


Raven Girls - Deleted Scenes

by lesbiankavinsky



Series: Lady TRC [2]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F, F/M, Other, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character, or as gansey would say tighten your liberty bodices, these are gonna range from cavity inducing sweet to soul crushingly sad so buckle your seat belts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-05-09
Packaged: 2018-05-25 08:53:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 23,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6188170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbiankavinsky/pseuds/lesbiankavinsky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a collection of extras that go with the <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/5695192/chapters/13119088">Raven Girls</a> fic, including both canon and non-canon scenes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Blue Week #1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Persephone’s room housed, among other things, a fishtank in front of which Blue would sit as willingly as in front of the battered TV in the basement, watching the fish dart back and forth while Persephone hummed angrily at her laptop. He had been sitting in front of the fish tank when he’d told Persephone, “I don’t think I’m a girl.”

There are some things that become a part of who you are so early in your childhood that it’s impossible to imagine the world without them. For Blue, that list included the knowledge that he could kill his true love with a kiss, a deep and abiding love for the outdoors, and a feeling of deep discomfort toward all things related to gender. The first was thanks to the house he grew up in, which was filled to the brim with psychic women. It was a large house, sprawling and cluttered and inhabited by the majority of the clairvoyant population of Henrietta. This meant that there were frequent disagreement as to the meaning of signs and portents, but there was absolute unanimity when it came to Blue’s fortune. He took it in stride. By the time he was sixteen, he had yet to meet anyone he wanted to kiss. His love of the outdoors was largely due to the three women he considered his mothers: Maura, his birth mother, and Persephone and Calla. From an early age, they’d been in the habit of taking him to the backyard at night to look at the stars. Calla took him on long nature walks, pointing out various flora and fauna along the way and giving him a ride on her shoulders when he became too tired to walk. Persephone’s room housed, among other things, a fishtank in front of which Blue would sit as willingly as in front of the battered TV in the basement, watching the fish dart back and forth while Persephone hummed angrily at her laptop. He had been sitting in front of the fish tank when he’d told Persephone, “I don’t think I’m a girl.”

Persephone’s humming broke off. “You know, I always wondered about that.”

Blue turned to look at her. “How do you mean?”  
“Well, when Maura was pregnant with you, none of us could agree about whether you were a boy or a girl. Jimi was convinced you were a girl, but Calla swore to heaven and back that you were a boy.”

“What did you think?”

Persephone squinted at him. “I could never decide.”

Blue sighed. “I don’t think I can decide either.”

Persephone shrugged and began typing again. “You don’t have to, you know.”

Now, six years later, Blue has a flat chest, an M on his driver’s license, and a residual discomfort about gender. To anyone who asks, he describes himself as 85% boy, but people don’t usually ask. He’s mostly okay with that. He’s happier with people reading him as a boy than as a girl, and all the women of Fox Way understand the fluidity of his identity. Since most of his time is spent at home, it’s not really an issue. 

He is, though, getting a little worried about the question of kissing. It’s not that he’s interested in anyone in particular, but he’s sensible and he likes to plan ahead and he’s getting less and less sure about the idea of a life spent single, travelling around the world and studying marine biology. It’s a plan he’s had since he was eleven, when he had informed his mother that he would just have to keep his head down through puberty and ignore his hormones, and he’d be home free by the age of twenty. She’d smiled and shook her head and told him, “Good luck with that.”

The problem, much to his surprise, is not that he’s lonely or has a crush. It’s an almost insatiable curiosity about what a kiss is like. He thinks if he could just try it once, he’d be set for life, and he could go back to his plan. No more kissing, no more romance, no more curiosity. It’s scientific, he tells himself. A desire to understand what everyone else is talking about. He finds himself thinking about it on his bike ride to school, in the quiet stretches of his shifts at Nino’s, lying in the backyard at night watching the stars. Late at night, watching the branches of a tree outside his window, he drums his fingers over his collarbones and wonders when he became a romantic. He’s always been very reasonable, an odd and oddly practical person in this house, but lately he’s started wanting things that don’t make sense. To know more about his father, to be far enough away from this place to know what homesickness is like, to be kissed. He’s not the type to court danger in general, but he knows that getting any of these things requires a certain amount of risk. Getting out of bed, he crosses to the window and opens it, hanging outside to feel the cool spring breeze. There used to be a safety screen across it but he’d learned how to take it out a few years ago. 

He closes his eyes and tilts his head and hums a little. Sixteen seems like a year for change, for new adventures, for getting a little more of what he wants out of life. On his birthday, Blue’s mother had told him that sixteen is a frightful year and that he should be especially careful. But when he says the word sixteen, he doesn’t think it sounds frightful at all. He thinks it sounds like opportunity. He is thinking about stasis and comfort, about potential and fulfillment. He thinks about the tarot card his mother has always compared him to -- the Page of Cups, who symbolizes, among other things, the arrival of the new and the unexpected. If he breathes deeply, he can smell the coming summer. It’s there in the warm tones of dirt and grass and honeysuckle. He can smell, too, the last hints of winter, sharp and cool in his lungs. Blue thinks of things that turn. Seasons, leaves, the earth on its axis. His own heart, temperamental despite his good sense and will to be otherwise. He is the only member of the household who isn’t psychic, and perhaps because of this he makes an effort not to make guesses about the future. Still, he has the feeling that this is the year things will start to change.


	2. Blue Week #2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He can see now that it’s a girl, wearing the pleated skirt and emblazoned cardigan of Aglionby Academy. She stands like a schoolgirl, hands clasped behind her back, but her expression is terrible. It doesn’t make sense because he can’t actually see her face. It’s more like sense, like when his mother lies behind him in his bed and even with his back turned, even with the lights out, he can tell that she’s holding back tears. Except you’re only supposed to be able to sense that kind of thing with people you love. People you’re connected to.

The church watch is a tradition for Blue, as familiar and punctual as his birthday, but this year he’s with Neeve instead of his mother, and it feels strange. She asks him questions, about school and girls and life with Maura. Usually, he just listens to the list of names and carefully writes them down, approximating spelling, and waits for the night to be over so he can crawl into bed for a few hours of sleep before school. Neeve isn’t exactly chatty, but she is inquisitive, and this makes him wary of her. He’s mostly just cold and tired and ready to go home, not actually unnerved by the change to the tradition or even the morbid task at hand. It’s too familiar to frighten him. But then he looks up and he sees a figure.

It doesn’t look the way he thinks a ghost should. It’s not transparent or wavering or glitching. It’s more like a distant star, easier to see if you don’t look directly at it. Brighter in your peripheral vision. Blue thinks all the blood in his body must stop moving as he opens his mouth to speak. “I see her.” Then, again, more urgently. “Neeve, I see her.” 

He had only looked up from his notebook because Neeve had had to ask for a name twice, apparently without success. Now every part of his body feels cold. 

“Get her name. She won’t answer me and I need to get the others!”

“Me?” Blue only looks at her for a moment before Neeve nods urgently and takes the notepad and pen from his hands. Standing, he moves down the line toward the retreating figure. He can see now that it’s a girl, wearing the pleated skirt and emblazoned cardigan of Aglionby Academy. She stands like a schoolgirl, hands clasped behind her back, but her expression is terrible. It doesn’t make sense because he can’t actually see her face. It’s more like sense, like when his mother lies behind him in his bed and even with his back turned, even with the lights out, he can tell that she’s holding back tears. Except you’re only supposed to be able to sense that kind of thing with people you love. People you’re connected to. He can’t imagine feeling that way toward an Aglionby girl. 

“What’s your name?” When he speaks, she turns toward him a little, and the movement seems all wrong, like the turning of a figure whose bones don’t all hinge together correctly. She brings her hands up to her face. He thinks she must recognize him, and that makes him feel worse. The dip in his stomach makes him realize he had already been feeling terrible. Just looking at her, he feels like he’s breaking apart.

She turns away, continuing down the path to the church, stumbling a little over her feet. He looks down and sees that she’s wearing kitten heels and for some reason, this almost makes him laugh, but the laugh turns almost to a sob in his throat. He tries again. “Who are you?” 

She shakes her head a little at him, the movement frantic, like she’s trying to tell him that she can’t speak. Softer, more gently, he says, “Please, will you tell me your name?”

Finally she takes her hands away from her mouth. It must be an illusion, but he thinks he almost can almost feel her breath warm against his face, and smell mint. Her lips are pink and terribly young, but then he blinks and her face is again featureless and vague. Her voice, though, is surprisingly solid. Low and deeper than he expected, lovely in a way that is physically painful to him. “Gansey,” she says. 

It’s an incomplete answer, but when she says it, it seems right to Blue. As if he’d known her name all along, as though it had been on the tip of his tongue. He can’t get used to the way she shifts in and out of focus, how one moment he can see clearly the blue of her eyes, her hair in damp curls against the rain soaked shoulders of her cardigan. He thinks, it will be raining when she dies. He thinks, Gansey. 

“Is that all?” He asks, trying to keep in mind through all of this that he has a job to do, that he needs to bring this girl’s name back for his mother. He wishes he could say something else, like “it’s going to be okay,” or “I’m here for you,” but that’s not his job, and anyway it isn’t true. She isn’t going to be fine. This girl with her sweet voice and strange name and her kitten heels will be dead before Blue turns eighteen. Blue thinks he will die of this thought.

“That’s all there is,” she says, and with this she falls to the ground as if overwhelmed by pain or grief. Blue can see her fingernails digging in the dirt though he can no longer distinguish the color of her hair which a moment ago he’d seen clinging in wet strands to the side of her face. He wants to take her hand and hold it, and this makes him aware of the fact that not only his hand but his whole body is trembling. She is fading, not like light but like the memory of a dream, fragment by fragment in a way that his mind can’t quite make sense of. Though he has never met this girl, he feels that this is what it is to lose someone. All of a sudden, he doesn’t understand how anyone could survive this life. 

“Neeve,” he says softly, aware of her presence behind him and needing to speak. “Neeve, she’s -- dying.”

“Not yet,” she says, and Blue thinks that this must be her voice when she is trying to be gentle or kind. 

“Why -- why can I see her?” He asks, though it’s not really the most important question on his mind right now. He is watching, trying to hold all the parts of her together, but he can’t really see her anymore. She’s gone, and he’s trying to make that stop hurting so much. 

“There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve, Blue. Either you’re her true love, or you killed her.”

Blue finally tears his eyes away from where Gansey had been kneeling on the ground, his mouth open but unable to form words. It doesn’t seem right or possible when he thinks about it logically, but it also feels the way learning her name had felt. Like he’d known all along and just couldn’t remember. It seems frightening and obvious, a piece of knowledge he hadn’t dared to look at because it had the power to take him apart. Of course, he thinks. Of course he loves her. How could it have been anything else?


	3. Blue Week #3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s one of the girls from the table where Miss Virginia 2012 had been sitting. It’s the pretty one. No, Blue thinks -- not pretty. Miss Virginia 2012 had been pretty. This girl is something else -- elegant. Like a woodland princess or an elf. Somehow otherworldly despite being distinctly local in both her accent and her features.

Blue is unlocking his bike from the rack behind Nino’s when he hears a voice behind him.

“Excuse me, um, sir -- hi.” 

He turns, trying to remember the last time someone called him “sir.” It’s one of the girls from the table where Miss Virginia 2012 had been sitting. It’s the pretty one. No, Blue thinks -- not pretty. Miss Virginia 2012 had been pretty. This girl is something else -- elegant. Like a woodland princess or an elf. Somehow otherworldly despite being distinctly local in both her accent and her features. Her hands are on the handlebar of a bike that looks like it was probably once green.

“Hi. Eve, is it?” Miss Virginia 2012 had given Blue her name -- this is the girl who had wanted to talk to him, the one who had thought he was cute.

The girl nods in acknowledgment of her name, a slow and simple gesture. “I was on my way home and I thought I recognized you over here. I wanted to say sorry. About what happened earlier. I didn’t tell her to do that and I wanted you to know.” She has her hands stuffed into the pockets of her slightly worn jeans and her whole posture is a little awkward, a little repentant. The jeans strike Blue somehow as odd. They aren’t at all like the jeans the hostile girl had been wearing, clearly pricey but deliberately torn, nor like Miss Virginia 2012’s brand new looking skinny jeans. All the clothes Eve is wearing look lived in. Perhaps that’s a generous way to put it, because it looks like they’ve been lived in a few more years than intended. The hem of her shirt doesn’t come quite to the waist of her pants, and it leaves a little strip of her stomach bare. It’s cute, and on any other Aglionby girl Blue would assume it was intentional, but on Eve it just makes Blue wonder when the last time she could afford a new shirt was. 

Blue doesn’t look at her when he says, “Well, that’s nice of you, but it’s not you that needed to apologize.” It isn’t an unkind thing to say, but it’s a brushoff and Blue feels bad about it because this girl isn’t only pretty, she also seems sweet and considerate and not at all Aglionby. 

“I can’t let her take all the blame. I mean, she was right. I did want to talk to you. But I didn’t want to just -- try to pick you up.”

Blue smiles down at the ground when he hears that. He’s not used to the idea of a girl trying to pick him up, and now it seems funny to him. “And what is it you wanted to do?” He asks, looking back up. He tries not to think about the implications of the fact that he’s glad she ignored his brushoff.

“Talk,” she says, her voice making the word long and lovely. “I guess I could have just saved a lot of trouble by coming up to talk to you in the first place. Other people’s ideas always seem to get me into more trouble.”

“It wasn’t about what she was saying about you, anyway,” Blue replies, fidgeting with the gearshift on his bike and hoping that the guesses he’s made about Eve are accurate and that she’ll understand why he was so offended by Gansey’s offer. “It was that she offered me money.” 

The way Eve cringes when she hears that tells him that she understands perfectly. “She doesn’t know,” she says wearily. “She’s stupid about money.”

“And you aren’t?” Blue says, looking at her intently. It seems such a strange thing that a girl like this with her too-small shirt and her Henrietta valley voice and her apologies should be a Raven Girl. Eve looks at him, like she doesn’t need to give an answer. He asks, “Are you coming back to Nino’s?”

“Am I invited?” Blue likes the fact that she would think to ask. Maybe that’s why he pulls a napkin from his pocket and spreads it on the seat of his bike to write out his phone number. It’s a risk, he thinks, to give the house number to a girl who might call expecting it to be a cell and get Calla or Maura or Orla on the line, but it’s a risk he’s willing to take. He hands the napkin to Eve and she smiles at it for a moment before slipping it into her back pocket. “I’m glad I came back.” And with that she turns her bike around and gets on it, pedalling away down the street. 

Blue finishes unlocking his bike, but before he can start the trip home, he hears the back door open and sees Donny, the manager, come out, holding a leather notebook. “Do you know who left this behind? Is it yours?” Blue puts down the kickstand of his bike and walks over to the curb where Donny stands. He puts the notebook into Blue’s outstretched hands and continues. “I didn’t really read it, I just wanted to see if there was a name in there to return it. But then I saw that it was -- well, it’s your stuff.”

Blue understands what Donny means as soon as he opens the notebook. There are notes on energy and places of mystical significance and, on one page he flips to, what appears to be a hoax photo of ghosts in a graveyard. He’d seen it on the table where Eve had been sitting, so he says, “I think I know who it belongs to. I’ll take it.” Donny goes back inside and for several moments, Blue stands there instead of returning to his bike and goes through the journal. It feels like an invasion of privacy because it’s clearly a much-loved object, compiled with time and care, but he pushes his slight pang of guilt aside. 

It bulges slightly from the newspaper clippings glued into it, but most of the pages are full of notes, quotes in neat handwriting with painstaking citations, and paragraphs of theories about someone named Glyndower in which the penmanship slowly deteriorates into a loose scrawl. In some places there are doodles, geometrical shapes and a sleeping kitten and then, over and over again, a familiar triangular shape that Blue runs his fingers over for a moment before remembering where he’d seen it before. His mother had drawn this shape in the steam on the bathroom mirror the other day. It doesn’t seem to him like a coincidence. He closes the journal and presses it close to his chest, considering whose it might be and why it seems so terribly significant. It must have belonged to one of the girls at the table, but it doesn’t seem like it should belong to a teenager, especially an Aglionby girl. There’s a desperate intensity to it that unnerves Blue and seems utterly out of keeping with anyone who might come to Nino’s on a Friday night. Slowly he walks back to his bike and deposits the journal in the basket on the front before putting up the kickstand and beginning the ride home. 

It’s dark and a little bit windy and Blue thinks he can smell the newly arrived spring in the air. He wants for some reason to ride around Henrietta instead of going straight home, to go by the houses as the lights begin to go out, to stand watch over the sleeping town. But he knows that his mother will worry and that there will be trouble if he turns up late, so he just rides a little more slowly than usual, thinking about the weight of the journal in his basket and Eve and the turning of the season.


	4. Blusey Week #1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The girl in front of him is wearing an Aglionby uniform, but Blue rarely sees girls that can make it look so good. He thinks it’s likely that she took a quarter of an hour just making sure the sleeves were rolled up just right. The pleats on her skirt are perfectly ironed, the top few buttons of her shirt unbuttoned, and Blue thinks even gravity must love this girl because the fabric folds perfectly symmetrically across her chest. She looks like her mother entered her in beauty pageants starting at the age of four, and Blue mentally dubs her Miss Virginia 2012.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry for the late update! Hopefully Wednesday's will be earlier

Blue determined a long time ago that there isn’t such a thing as a pleasant shift at Nino’s but this one has gone by with relatively little misery, and the evening had been made interesting by the call from his mother informing him that Gansey, whose spirit he’d seen at the church watch, has scheduled a reading. It’s not necessarily good news, but it had been taking his mind off the various horrors of customer service. He’s actually eyeing the clock and thinking that he’s reached the point where nothing truly terrible can happen before he goes home when he feels a hand on his shoulder. It moves in response to his full body flinch and the girl who had touched him has taken a step back by the time he turns around to face her. 

“Can I help you?” He asks, hoping to indicate by his tone that he would rather do almost anything than help her. The girl in front of him is wearing an Aglionby uniform, but Blue rarely sees girls that can make it look so good. He thinks it’s likely that she took a quarter of an hour just making sure the sleeves were rolled up just right. The pleats on her skirt are perfectly ironed, the top few buttons of her shirt unbuttoned, and Blue thinks even gravity must love this girl because the fabric folds perfectly symmetrically across her chest. She looks like her mother entered her in beauty pageants starting at the age of four, and Blue mentally dubs her Miss Virginia 2012. 

“I certainly hope so,” Miss Virginia 2012 says with a flashy grin full of white, white teeth and Blue thinks: this is not going to end well. “My socially inhibited friend Eve thinks you’re cute, but she’s unwilling to make a move. Over there.”

The booth she gestures too has only one occupant, though Blue thinks he remembers seeing four there earlier. The only one remaining is a pretty girl with auburn hair who looks like she’s trying to disappear into the plastic lining of her seat. Blue doesn’t want to watch her long enough to consider just how pretty she is, so he snaps his attention back to Miss Virginia 2012 and says, “So?”

“So would you do me a favor and come over and talk to her?”

Blue rolls his eyes and crosses his arms over his chest. He’s glad that Miss Virginia 2012 is so naturally irritating to him because it means he doesn’t have to do the mental math of himself plus the pretty girl plus a curse related to true love that ends with no one being happy in order to make the decision to reject the suggestion. “First of all, I’m working. Second of all, I have nothing to talk to you or your friend about. I doubt we have anything in common. Third of all, just because most boys are interested in girls doesn’t mean I am, and you shouldn’t just assume I’m straight.”

Miss Virginia 2012’s eyes go wide. “Oh!” She says, sounding so startled that Blue almost feels bad for enjoying her awkwardness. Almost. Really he only feels bad for implying he’s gay when he isn’t, but it’s only a slight bending of the truth because he isn’t often interested in girls. “Oh, I’m so sorry. For the record, I’m not.”

Blue frowns. “Not what?”

“Not straight,” she says, with a visible blush, and now Blue really does feel bad.

“Oh,” Blue says, unsure how to continue the conversation, but he feels like he should be honest with her in return so he says, “I actually am interested in girls. So.” 

Miss Virginia 2012 perks up immediately. “Oh! Oh well maybe you could come talk to her then, because she really does think you’re cute and she’s awfully shy and if you tell me how much you make in an hour here I could cover for you taking a break.”

It’s such an Aglionby girl thing to say that Blue needs a moment to formulate a response. There’s a brief moment where he feels more sad than anything else, thinking about how far away his reality is from from hers, but that sadness quickly turns to anger and he snaps back at her. “If you have to pay a boy to talk to her, maybe she needs to reevaluate her social skills. And honestly? I don’t want to talk to you or any of your friends because I actually have to work for a living when you apparently have enough money to throw at people to hook them up with your pals and you don’t even know enough about what it means to have a job to understand that I can’t just say I want to take a break and have you cover my salary for an hour. Now please stop talking to me before I do something to get myself fired, because I actually can’t afford to lose this job. But you wouldn’t know what that feels like, would you?”

Miss Virginia 2012 has her mouth open in a little pathetic “o” and Blue feels some satisfaction in the fact that he’s actually managed to ruffle her. She might actually have been stupid enough to say something more, but just then another girl steps up to her and puts a hand around her wrist, tugging insistently. Blue thinks he recognizes her as one of the friends who’d been sitting at the booth earlier. 

“You’ve got to come,” the girl says. “Declan showed up.”

“Oh, God,” Miss Virginia 2012 says, putting a hand up to her eyes, and she says it wearily, as though a girl like her could have real troubles. The girl begins to pull her away, but before she takes a step, Miss Virginia 2012 turns back to Blue and says simply, “I’m sorry,” before hurrying off after her friend. 

Blue rubs his eyes and looks back up at the clock. Soon he can go home and talk to his mother about Gansey’s upcoming reading and tell Calla about Miss Virginia 2012 so they can mock her mercilessly together and drink the bedtime tea that Persephone makes for him which he’s convinced is at least 50% honey and then he’ll feel more human. For now, he just hopes that whoever Declan is, he’s making Miss Virginia 2012’s night as shitty as she’d made his.


	5. Blusey Week #2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gansey has to resist the urge to pull of the side of the road and just hug Blue, because she’s never gotten to talk to anyone like this before, not ever in her life. “I know exactly what you mean,” she says, and it feels good for those words to be true.

The first time it comes up is on the drive to the church. Gansey, in a typical state of anxiety, is talking more than she means to. 

“I’m sorry if it’s difficult or awkward,” she says. “Hanging out with us. Being the only boy. And let me know if Ronan gives you any shit, she doesn’t really like being around guys but she should get used to it, she’s not going to be at Aglionby forever.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Blue says. 

The answer strikes Gansey as odd, and she glances over at him. He’s tugging at the hem of his shirt, the same way Eve does. She wonders if it’s a tic he picked up from her. “Don’t know what?”

“About being a boy.” 

Gansey could kick herself. Her, of all people, to make assumptions -- but she stops herself before she thinks about it too much and just says. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken that for granted. Gender, in my experience, can be quite difficult.”

“Your experience?”

Gansey swallows hard. She hadn’t been intending to come out today, hadn’t woken up with it in her mind as something she had to prepare for, and even though Blue has basically just said he (they? She makes a mental note that she should ask) isn’t cis, she can feel the familiar terror welling up inside of her. “I’m trans,” she says, keeping her eyes firmly on the road. 

“Oh,” Blue says, and there’s a new warmth in his voice. “I didn’t realize.”

“I’ve put a lot of time and money into making sure people don’t.” The words come out to fast for her to mask the bitterness in them, and in the ensuing silence, she wishes she hadn’t said anything. She takes another deep breath and glances at Blue, and decides to fix it. “I’m kind of glad you know, though. Eve and Leah and Ronan do. I generally prefer to keep it private but it’d be nice to have someone I could talk to. I mean really have a conversation with. Ronan gets some parts of it. She’s been out for years and she gets a lot of heat for it. And she doesn’t exactly conform to societal expectations of femininity but it’s --”

“Different,” Blue says, and his voice is low and understanding and Gansey feels her entire body relax at the tone. “I’m AFAB and I’ve never had a lot of money but my mom spent all her savings to help pay for surgery and hormones and stuff. And sometimes I feel guilty about it, because like I said. I’m not sure I’m 100% a boy. Or at least, I’m not a boy 100% of the time. You know? Like I use he/him pronouns and when I look in the mirror most of the time I think yeah, that’s a boy, and when I think about myself I usually feel like a boy but I’m not -- I’m not a boy the way the guys at school are boys, I think. And not because I’m trans. And then there are days when I’m sure I’m not a boy. So sometimes I feel like I wasted her money. But then I think --” He pauses for a minute, as though weighing whether or not he should actually finish the sentence. “Then I think about how much less often I want to die now, and that’s got to be worth it.”

Gansey has to resist the urge to pull of the side of the road and just hug Blue, because she’s never gotten to talk to anyone like this before, not ever in her life. “I know exactly what you mean,” she says, and it feels good for those words to be true. “I mean -- it was never hard for me and my family to afford those things. I’m aware of how lucky I am. But I know what you mean about --”

“Yeah.”

They settle into a comfortable silence, and Gansey marvels at how much closer to him she feels than she had a few minutes ago. After a few moments, he says, “So Aglionby’s okay with it?”

“I think Aglionby would be okay with just about anyone carrying the Gansey name. My sister, Helen, went to Aglionby and my parents are both big donors. If it had been Eve -- I don’t think it would have gone so smoothly.” She squeezes the steering wheel and says again, “I’m aware of how lucky I am.”

“Hmm,” Blue says, and Gansey glances over at him, wondering why there’s a sudden skepticism in his voice. “I don’t know about that.”

“About what?”

“About you being lucky. I mean, you’re lucky to have money and a family willing to spend it on you. You’re lucky to go to Aglionby. But I don’t think it’s very smart to just say you’re lucky and ignore the fact that you have problems too. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m all about trans positivity, but there’s a certain level where it’s just -- it’s hard. It’s hard to be trans and Eve doesn’t know that in all the ways you do.”

Gansey clears her throat, aware that her voice would shake if she spoke without doing so. “Thank you for saying that,” she says. “I do appreciate it.”

“You don’t think it’s true?” Blue asks, sensing the hesitation in her reply.

“No, it is true. And it helps to be reminded of that. But at the same time -- you haven’t seen Eve at her worst. I don’t mean her worst like her personal worst, I mean like when the world around her is at it’s worst. You haven’t seen how tired she can be. You haven’t seen how hard she’s had to work for every tiny thing she has. So even if I know that my life isn’t perfect, it’s hard to not to feel lucky when I see her like that. It’s hard not to think it isn’t fair.”

Blue shrugs. “Life’s not fair,” he says, and he seems okay with that in a way Gansey can’t imagine being. Then again, she realizes, she hasn’t seen all of him, either. She hasn’t seen him face to face with that unfairness, and she thinks there are probably cracks in that smooth, calm answer of his when he isn’t sitting quietly in the passenger seat of a car, when it isn’t a lovely, sunny spring day, when the unfairness of life becomes material.

“Yes,” she says. “That’s true. But thank you for saying that to me, anyway.”


	6. Blusey Week #3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And then Blue asks her why she’s looking for Glyndower and it takes her a moment to respond, because though she’s told dozens of people about her quest, hardly any of them ask why. She’s always been obsessive, one of the more manageable symptoms of her autism, and no one really questions the source of this one. Her closest friends know, but no one else. But really, it’s past time for Blue to know. And so she finds herself telling the story of the night she died. Maybe, she thinks, if she told this more often, it would stop hurting so much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for another late update! Warning for bugs & death

When they arrive at the church, Gansey still feels peculiarly close to Blue. She’d been frightened that it would only be a moment, that after a little time passed they would go back to the way things were before, her always feeling awkward around Blue and Blue seeming a bit standoffish. But somehow the small talk between them is easier than it’s ever been, light and bantering the way Blue is with Eve and with Leah and Gansey feels like this group is going to be whole again soon, that all the strange sharp edges that have come to the surface as Blue becomes one of them are going to be worn away and fade entirely. Once, when she calls him Tom, he calls her Robin, and when she says, “Please don’t,” he realizes his mistake and retracts immediately. Somehow, this only makes her feel closer to him. 

They talk about the usual things, Glyndower and the ley lines, and somewhere along the way she realizes how nice it is to talk to someone who has always lived in the world she stumbled on and introduced Ronan and Eve and Leah to. A world where time folds in on itself, where death is negotiable, ancient queens still hold their power deep beneath the surface of the soil. Blue was born into such beliefs. Everyone else Gansey knows has had to work for them. And then Blue tells her, “My mom’s told me, ever since I was born, that if I kiss my true love, she’ll die.” Gansey, half thinking it’s a joke, chokes out a laugh, but Blue’s eyes when he looks at her are cold and serious and pissed off. “Don’t laugh, you --” Blue doesn’t finish the sentence.

Gansey’s still grinning a little when she says, “Well, it’s just a very precautionary sounding sort of thing, isn’t it? Don’t date or you’ll go blind. Kiss your true love and she bites it.”

“It’s not just her! Every psychic or medium I’ve ever met tells me the same thing. Besides, my mom’s not like that. She wouldn’t just play around with something like that. It’s not pretend.” Blue sounds actually offended and it’s only now that Gansey realizes how real and serious this is to him, that this is something that defines him and his life. She feels like an asshole for not thinking about that before.

She brushes her bottom lip with her thumb to settle herself a little before she says, “Sorry. I was being a dick again. Do you know how she’s supposed to die, this unlucky gal?” When Blue only shrugs, she continues, “Ah. Devil’s in the details, I guess. So you just kiss nobody, in a precautionary way? That seems grim, Tom. I won’t lie.”

“I don’t usually tell people. I don’t know why I told you. Don’t tell Eve.”

Something goes cold inside Gansey, though she can’t say why. It shouldn’t matter to her that Blue wants to kiss Eve. She’s seen how Eve is around him, she should be happy for them, but instead she feels an inexplicable sense of loss. “It’s like that, is it?”

Blue denies it ferociously but clumsily, and they move away from the topic with Gansey only saying, “Well, if you killed Eve, I’d be quite upset.” It’s such an understatement as to be absurd. Quite upset is what she’d be if she flunked Latin or got a dent in the Camaro. If she thinks too much about how she’d be if she lost Eve, she begins to lose her words, so she turns her mind away from the thought as forcefully as she can and says, “Thanks for telling me.”

And then Blue asks her why she’s looking for Glyndower and it takes her a moment to respond, because though she’s told dozens of people about her quest, hardly any of them ask why. She’s always been obsessive, one of the more manageable symptoms of her autism, and no one really questions the source of this one. Her closest friends know, but no one else. But really, it’s past time for Blue to know. And so she finds herself telling the story of the night she died. Maybe, she thinks, if she told this more often, it would stop hurting so much. But the memory of the hornets, the pain of each sting, the sensation of her heart stopping, seems too important not to be painful. When she gets to the part about the voice telling her that she will live because of Glyndower, and that somewhere else, someone was dying in her place, she feels again that relief at knowing that Blue will believe her implicitly. 

And Blue does believe it. He accepts the entire story without question, though he seems quieter now than before. The simple product of hearing someone talk about their own death in the past tense, she thinks. Soon enough, they’re distracted by the fluctuation of the EMF reader. They’re in the forest behind the church now, walking steadily deeper into the trees as the sky above them darkens with the threat of rain, thunder already rumbling in the distance. For a while they mess with the reader, stepping back and forth, handing it between them in the hopes that Blue’s amplifying abilities will put them back on course. But then Gansey looks down and sees what looks like a bone between Blue’s feet, and her heart goes still. It’s irrational, she knows, probably just an animal, but all the same, she says, “Step back. There’s --”

Gansey kneels on the forest floor and carefully, carefully, keeping her hands as steady as she can, she sweeps away the leaves covering the bone, and now her heart is picking up at double its usual rate because the more she uncovers it, the more obvious it becomes that this is a human skeleton. 

Above her, Blue says softly, “Gansey, this was a kid. This was a kid from Aglionby.”

And it’s true, undeniably, because nestled in the ribcage is the Raven crest sewn into every blazer and cardigan worn by the girls of the school, and seeing it there raises an unformed sob in Gansey’s throat, a grief that comes from whoever this girl had been being too much like Gansey for it to matter that they hadn’t known each other. 

“We should report it,” Blue says, sounding only a little steadier than Gansey feels. 

“Wait,” Gansey says, because she’s spotted a wallet settled against the pelvis. She lifts it and pulls out the driver’s license to see whose it is, and she stops breathing. For a moment she thinks she’s going to hyperventilate or black out because she doesn’t need to even look at the name, the face on the card is more familiar than Blue’s. It’s Leah. She looks at the name just to double check, and there it is, as impossible as it is undeniable. There’s a long moment when Gansey thinks she’s never going to breath again, because Leah is dead, Leah is dead and it’s many, many years too late to save her.


	7. Eve Week #1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eve is accustomed at this point in her life to wanting things she knows she’ll never have, but she doesn’t think she’s ever wanted anything before the way she wants to kiss Blue. It’s a want that’s as unremitting as her desire for sleep but somehow it seems even more necessary for existence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the hiatus! I should be back on a regular schedule now. 
> 
> Warnings for mentions of abuse & alcohol

Eve had had to fight for her job as a mechanic. Despite her broad and muscular shoulders, she doesn’t look like much. She’s on the short side and she’s pretty, which means most people don’t expect her to be competent or strong or in any way above average. But she’d come back three days in a row asking the man who ran the garage for a chance to show him what she could do, and eventually, through sheer persistence, she’d gotten the job. She’s good at it, and it’s neither as exhausting as her factory job nor as soul-crushing as her retail job, so it’s her favorite by default, even if it keeps her back in a continual state of pain. For her, working on cars has always been a meditative process. Her knowledge is sufficiently broad and deeply ingrained that she can let her mind wander as she goes about fixing the car in front of her. These days, more often than not, she’s thinking of Blue.

Eve Parrish, as a rule, doesn’t have crushes. They’re distracting and dangerous and she doesn’t have emotional room for them. But most of all, she doesn’t have the time. She doesn’t have the time to think about boys or to go on dates with them or even to find them, given that most of her social activity is linked to school, and there are no boys at Aglionby. Maybe that’s why Gansey had volunteered to talk to the waiter at Nino’s for her, why she’d gone up to him even after Eve told her it wasn’t worth the trouble. Even though Gansey had made a fool of herself that night, Eve is glad she’d talked to him, because if she hadn’t, there’s a chance they wouldn’t have spoken again after the reading, and the idea of not having Blue in her life is too painful to think about. She gets through her days by thinking about the fact that she’ll see him at Monmouth. When her father hits her and she leaves her own body, her mind settles on the feeling of his hand in hers, the beating of his pulse against her skin. Eve is accustomed at this point in her life to wanting things she knows she’ll never have, but she doesn’t think she’s ever wanted anything before the way she wants to kiss Blue. It’s a want that’s as unremitting as her desire for sleep but somehow it seems even more necessary for existence. 

Some part of her is aware that she’s being obvious, giving herself away every time she’s near him, but she can’t quite bring herself to care. Even when it’s obvious that Ronan is jealous, even when she’s beginning to wonder if Gansey is jealous, too. She cares about them, of course, but it’s not the same as how she feels about Blue. The way she cares about Blue is all-consuming, obsessive, almost painful. Sometimes she thinks that it’s the way Ronan cares about Gansey, but she tries not to dwell on that too long. She tries not to dwell on Ronan too long in general. Ronan is a dangerous topic, even for private contemplation. 

But Blue is, in a strange way, safe. Eve has never thought of anything that elevates her heart rate as “safe” before, but part of what draws her to Blue is the security of him. His low voice. His unexpectedly soft hands. The smell of flowers about him. She can’t imagine feeling threatened by him, and she can’t imagine the sort of strain that sometimes develops between herself and Ronan or Gansey between the two of them. There’s no need to pretend or to try to impress with Blue, because they’re too much of the same world. And so this is how she’s begun to think of him. He is safe. He is easy and he is safe, and Eve has never had that before. 

Part of her thinks it’s probably unwise to get her hopes up too high. After all, they aren’t actually officially dating. They haven’t had a talk. But by nature and circumstance, Eve has always lived on dreams, so she can’t help but imagine an All-American happy ending for them. Blue taking her to prom, the two of the making out under the fireworks on the fourth of July, driving together into the mountains in a car. Her car. The one she’ll somehow buy by the end of high school. It’s a future she can imagine to take her mind off the exhaustion of her body, and whether or not it’s plausible isn’t really relevant. She wishes she didn’t always have to work so hard to distract herself from one thing or another: pain or stress or tiredness. Her latest fight with Gansey, the purple on her jaw that concealer won’t quite cover. One day, she promises herself, her life won’t be something she just wants to escape. One day, the moment will actually be something she wants to live in. One day, Blue will kiss her, and the entire world will go still. The harsh static of her mind replaced with quiet, every inch of her skin softened. It doesn’t matter that it isn’t really going to be that simple because she can pretend that it will be. She can pretend whatever she wants about the things she’s waiting for. After all, she is a creature made for patience. 

When her shift ends, Eve goes out to her bike and begins to pedal home. It’s easy enough to shake off her daydreams, easy enough to forget everything she’d imagined so that the next time she needs a fantasy, the same ones over again will do perfectly well. She wonders if her father will be awake when she gets home. She wonders if he’s been drinking today. As she gets closer and closer to the trailer park, she tries to quiet the heavy beating of her heart. It’ll be okay, she thinks. If he hits her, she’ll see stars in her eyes and think: fireworks on the fourth of July. There’s always a refuge inside of her head.


	8. Eve Week #2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All the same, she could use a little time alone. So she finds herself making time, leaving early and biking to Aglionby a good half hour before school starts, sometimes riding around the town, sometimes sitting quietly on one of the benches in the main courtyard of the school, sometimes finding some new and undiscovered spot to haunt, a gawkish girl without a smile for anyone who might pass by.

Eve tends to think of her life as a story. It’s how she gets things to make sense, it’s how she gets things to hurt less. If she can cast herself as an unlikely hero and see everything she has to endure as struggles appropriate to such a character, it makes it all survivable. This is just one part of the tale, and the next chapter will look very, very different. In the next chapter, she’ll be living far away from Henrietta. She will speak easily without a trace of her old accent. There are so many things that she wants that it’s hard to categorize or prioritize them. An apartment that makes people jealous. A good education. A better job. Enough money that she won’t have to mentally add up the prices of everything she puts in her cart and the grocery store to be sure she has enough with her to cover the total. But when it comes right down to it, what she wants is simple. She wants to get up in the morning and decide what she’s going to do with her day. She wants choices. It’s taken work to establish with Gansey that Eve is not there at her beck and call, that she comes when she wants to and doesn’t otherwise, because Gansey relies on routines. If Eve gets into the habit of coming to Monmouth whenever Gansey wants her there, Gansey will begin to assume that she’ll show up no matter what. Eve doesn’t want that.

Increasingly, she feels that none of her time is her own. If she isn’t at school, she’s at work or with Gansey and Ronan and Leah and Blue. In a way it’s good, because it keeps her out of the house, and she needs to be out of the house. All the same, she could use a little time alone. So she finds herself making time, leaving early and biking to Aglionby a good half hour before school starts, sometimes riding around the town, sometimes sitting quietly on one of the benches in the main courtyard of the school, sometimes finding some new and undiscovered spot to haunt, a gawkish girl without a smile for anyone who might pass by. It means she has less time to sleep, but she finds herself in this one instance unwilling to be pragmatic. This, too, is a sort of need, if not a physical one. A need for solitude and independence, a need to spend some part of the day doing what she wants to do, even if it’s entirely unproductive. Especially if it’s entirely unproductive. 

She thinks of Ronan, whose leisure is boundless and therefore pointless. Ronan never really has to be anywhere. She’s supposed to do many things, but she rarely does any of them. She skips school and homework and tennis practice, doesn’t reply to her brother’s phone calls, regularly fails to come along on Glyndower trips because she’s too busy sulking in her room. What she does is always by choice, and for this Eve envies her and her envy is a terrible, uncontrollable creature that often makes her dislike Ronan if she’s not already disliking her for her rudeness and hostility. Choice means nothing to Ronan, because she’s never been without it, and everything to Eve, because she’s never had it. 

Aglionby had been a choice, though. A choice she’d had to fight tooth and nail to be allowed to make, but one she had finally secured after working at it furiously for a year, finding time between classes to write the admissions essays, finding extra jobs to scrounge up the application fee, the deposit, the monthly tuition bills. She doesn’t like the fact that in many ways, she’d picked Aglionby out of spite, because she was so sick of seeing everything the raven girls had that she didn’t, sick of the impenetrable wall between herself and them. A wall which hadn’t come crashing down just because she’d gotten in -- one she’d had to keep chipping away at until she met Gansey and everything had changed. When she thinks about it, she considers the day the two of them had become friends as the day she’d actually become a raven girl, and that was long after she’d had her first day at the academy. And to be friends with Ronan was an even stranger thing than to be friends with Gansey, because it was Ronan -- or a girl with a car like Ronan’s -- who had pushed her over the edge and made her decide to apply. 

She’d been riding her bike home from work, exhausted, her jeans dirty, miserable as she pedaled through the rain, when a black BMW drove by her, splashing her with water. She’d been completely drenched and pissed off and as she watched the car drive away, she’d seen an Aglionby bumper sticker on the back. That night, she’d decided that she would go to that school, that she would be one of those girls. How she’d ended up friends with a girl who owned a black BMW, she wasn’t entirely sure, though she knew it couldn’t have been Ronan herself, who wasn’t old enough at the time to have a license. 

But getting into Aglionby hadn’t been enough. Eve still wants so much. She still wants to be able to drive home in a car and not be restricted to places she can get to on her bike. She still wants to be able to dedicate more time to her school work instead of spending all her energy making enough money to stay in school. She wants, most of all, to be out of Henrietta. Sometimes she thinks about what this will mean for her and her friends. Ronan will never leave this place, and Blue will never be able to stay in one place. It’s difficult to say where Gansey will end up. Somehow, it’s difficult to imagine a future Gansey, one driven by something other than the search for Glyndower. One way or another, it doesn’t seem likely that any of them will be near her, and the idea of a life without them is unspeakably lonely. So when Eve tells herself the story of her life, she doesn’t think about people. She doesn’t think about where any of the others will be. When she finds herself in need of distraction, she thinks of what she wants, not what she’ll lose along the way, and she tries not to let it keep her up at night.


	9. Eve Week #3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her theory of the universe is falling apart, and it’s all because of her fucking ear. No. That’s not true. It’s also because working three jobs still isn’t enough and she’s struggled all her life to believe that it would be. It’s also because the permanent damage done by her father is becoming obvious in other ways, too, and it’s getting harder to ignore: the way she just leaves her body for hours at a time, the panic, the paranoia. But there is also the fact that she can’t hear out of one ear and the kindness of the others grates and grates at her, and it’s not about money. It’s about a failure of self-sufficiency for which she would blame no one, except herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for discussion of abuse

The most difficult thing to deal with at first is the idea of permanence. She can’t stop shaking her head as though to clear her ear of water. Sometimes she finds herself absentmindedly snapping her fingers next to her ear like she used to to test it if it started buzzing. Usually after things are bad with her father, she focuses on the material features of recovery. The fading of the bruise after the day when she takes her makeup off, the decrease in pain when she delicately touches her ribs. A daily comparison, a log. How much less are you hurting today than yesterday. The concept of improvement, steady and reliable. She does not think: you are always going to wince when someone raises their voice. She does not think: you will always be formulating a plan for escape. She’s aware of all of that in the back of her mind, but that’s where she tries to keep the thoughts, carefully organized and stored to be considered at a later date, at a time when survival is the one and only imperative. The truth, and she knows it very well, is that she won’t be able to make it through each individual day if she thinks about the fact that her dad will still be fucking with her head in twenty years. It’s possible to ignore. The fact that she can’t hear out of one ear isn’t.

She’s frustrated by the seeming arbitrariness of it, that some sounds, some pitches, are harder to understand than others. That she can understand Gansey when she’s talking in the parking lot but not once they get inside Monmouth. That she always feels like she’s missing half of any conversation that involves more than three people. She’s frustrated, too, by the kindness of the others, and that makes her crazy. It makes her feel like Ronan, who bristles at any affection that isn’t given forcefully. She can’t sort it out. Before, she’d always assumed that she resented Gansey’s generosity because it made obvious their difference in class, like Gansey was showing off her money and the ease with which she could give it away. In her mind, she refusal always had to do with the fact that she didn’t need charity, that she worked plenty hard herself and that was enough. Her theory of the universe is falling apart, and it’s all because of her fucking ear. No. That’s not true. It’s also because working three jobs still isn’t enough and she’s struggled all her life to believe that it would be. It’s also because the permanent damage done by her father is becoming obvious in other ways, too, and it’s getting harder to ignore: the way she just leaves her body for hours at a time, the panic, the paranoia. But there is also the fact that she can’t hear out of one ear and the kindness of the others grates and grates at her, and it’s not about money. It’s about a failure of self-sufficiency for which she would blame no one, except herself. She hates too the elaborate prison of her head, the fact that every kindness has to be suspect because there could be strings attached, the cringe of shame that flares up in her uninvited every time someone does something for her. It’s exhausting not being able to have anyone be sweet to her without her insides doing gymnastics to figure out a way to make it into torture. Sometimes she thinks she wants to be someone other than herself, but then she stops being herself and she wants anything but that.

Lying in Leah’s bed at Monmouth, she knows she isn’t going to be able to sleep. The room, despite being tiny, feels enormous to her and she pulls the blankets over her head to create the illusion of an enclosed space. If she’s being honest with herself, she knows it’s not the space that’s throwing her off, though she’s never slept well in new beds. What’s keeping her up is the thought of Cabeswater and Whelk, of Gansey refusal to act, of her certainty that Eve would obey. She wants everything in her mind and heart to be clear and simple and straightforward, for her motives to be pure. But she knows that’s never going to happen, because even as she begins toying with the idea of sneaking out, of taking the Camaro (she could hotwire it, she knows she could) she’s aware that it wouldn’t be entirely for the protection of Cabeswater or to keep Whelk from her goal. It would also be to prove that she, Eve Parrish, could do what Gansey had told her not to do. She wants that more than she can say, and that’s a problem because despite her immense ability to ignore pain, to ignore exhaustion, to ignore frustration, she’s never been any good at ignoring desire, and so the desire to go out, to stop Whelk, to save Cabeswater and the ley line grows and grows in her like a fever until it becomes irresistible.

Her feet find the wooden floor and her toes curl against the cold. She has plenty of practice in being silent so it’s easy enough to shrug into her clothes, pull her door open soundlessly and creep past Gansey, asleep in bed, no moon to light her still form. As she hurries down the stairs, she tries not to think of Ronan doing just this on every night she’s ever gotten a call from Gansey begging her to come and help find their friend before it’s too late, before she’s past hope. She wonders if Ronan was past hope a long time ago. She wonders the same thing about herself. This isn’t the time to think about that, though. Right now, she has to focus on taking the Camaro (borrowing, she tells herself, not stealing) and getting far enough away fast enough that the others won’t be able to catch her before she’s done what she needs to do.


	10. Gansey Week #1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She hangs up the phone and for a moment she just stands in the backyard with it pressed to her chest, her eyes closed. Damn Ronan. But she understands, of course she does. Ronan has always hated school, but she hasn’t always been like this. Belligerent, hostile, unwilling to do anything she doesn’t want to do.

Gansey is almost relieved to hear her phone ring and have an excuse to duck out of her mother’s birthday party for a brief time. The number on the screen is Monmouth’s, and for a moment she wonders if it’ll be Ronan, calling to give her a break from her relatives, but when she answers it’s Eve’s voice on the other end of the line. 

“It’s Eve. Declan just came by. Ronan’s been expelled.” 

Gansey’s stomach drops. “Shit,” she says softly, pressing her thumb and forefinger to the corners of her eyes. “Okay. Okay, I’ll figure out a way to fix it.”

“I’m not sure it can be fixed this time. I thought maybe you could talk Declan into letting her stay. He might be easier to convince than the Aglionby admins.” 

“He’ll never let her stay with me. As it is he doesn’t like that she’s out of his control, but I’ve done a better job reigning her in since her mom, keeping her in school. But if she’s expelled -- god, I don’t know what he’ll do. He doesn’t like having to explain her to people.”  It’s one of the things about Declan that it took Gansey a long time to understand. Ronan’s resentment of him has always been brutal and entirely non-negotiable, but Gansey is the kind of person always looking to give second chances, so she’d tried to see good in him. At first, it had been easy. He wanted his sister to stay in school, he wanted her not to get in so many fights, he wanted her to go to therapy. These all seemed to her then like reasonable things for an older brother to want, but the more she got to know him, the more obvious it became that he didn’t care what happened to Ronan as long as her reputation didn’t interfere with his social life and his future career. Gansey has very little faith in him these days. 

“You really don’t think he’d let her stay if you told her that she’d probably --”

Gansey cuts Eve off, not wanting her to finish the sentence. “No, he doesn’t care. Better have a tragedy for a sister than a disgrace.”

“Okay. Okay, if you think you can fix it with the school, give it a try. Sooner rather than later, I think. The letter says she shouldn’t come to class on Monday. Not that she was going to anyway.” 

“I’ll fix it tonight. I promise,” she says, like it’s her own mess she’s cleaning up, like she needs to apologize to Eve. “Thanks for letting me know. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She hangs up the phone and for a moment she just stands in the backyard with it pressed to her chest, her eyes closed.  _ Damn Ronan.  _ But she understands, of course she does. Ronan has always hated school, but she hasn’t always been like this. Belligerent, hostile, unwilling to do anything she doesn’t want to do. And it’s not Ronan’s fault that all she wants to do is go back to the Barns and look after animals. It’s not that she won’t work, it’s that she’s a creature deeply unsuited to the life of prep schools and the Ivy League. She doesn’t belong, and she knows it, and as if that wasn’t enough, she hasn’t had a night’s sleep since she found her mother’s body. Gansey more than anyone else knows that almost everything about Ronan’s life is unfair, but she wishes she could just say  _ damn Ronan  _ and be done with it.

*

Gansey’s measured control lasts just long enough to get her on the highway. She’d been polite throughout her mother’s birthday party, she’d tolerated hearing her birthname all night, she’d been smooth and persuasive with the Aglionby admissions woman, and she’d gotten through a conversation with her father. Really, she ought to be proud of herself, but she only feels exhausted and angry. She presses harder on the gas. With God as her witness, she’s going to get back to Monmouth and beat the shit out of Ronan. Not that she could ever take Ronan in a fight, but she thinks that on a night like this, chances are that Ronan would take the punishment without resistance. How long is she going to have to keep saving Ronan’s sorry ass? When can it stop being her job to drag Ronan to class and back home, to make sure Ronan is studying and not drinking, to keep her from killing herself? There’s a twinge of guilt at that thought, but she pushes it away and keeps pressing on the gas. Ronan can go to hell where she probably belongs. 

She should have seen it coming, the way she keeps going faster and faster, but the shuddering of the engine as it dies takes her completely by surprise, and she only just manages to steer onto the shoulder before the wheels stopped moving. Dropping her hands to her lap, she tilts her head back and swears softly. Eve could have fixed whatever is wrong and Gansey has always believed that Ronan’s love of cars is reciprocated, and so as irrational as it is, she feels as though the Pig would have started back up for either of them. Even though it’s her car, the only thing she owns that she’s ever felt looks like her. Looks like her in the deep-down sense that Chainsaw looks like Ronan. She thinks about calling the tow company but she doesn’t want to have to talk to anyone right now. In fact, she’s not entirely sure that she could. She doesn’t go non-verbal very often, but when she does, it’s on nights like this. Maybe if she just waits for the engine to cool, it’ll start back up again. Maybe, like her, it just needs some time to stand still and uncoil. 

Gansey has her eyes closed when the car pulls up, but she hears it and the headlights turn the insides of her eyelids orange. She squints through the bright light to see a strangely familiar car. Coincidence, she thinks, though she doesn’t believe in coincidences, though the turning of her stomach tells her that this car belongs to exactly who she thinks it does. The figure emerging from the headlights confirms what her gut is already telling her. It’s Whelk. 


	11. Gansey Week #2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gansey wishes desperately that her brain would move at its usual pace, but the events of the evening have made her thoughts sluggish and it’s only with considerable effort that she is able to postpone the shutdown that she knows will inevitably hit. Seven years, she thinks. Seven years, and the police calling. Leah’s bones in the woods, the abandoned car, a teacher who always seemed too curious about Gansey’s quest. Eve’s suspicion that someone has been watching them. But most of all, Leah’s bones, settled in the dirt of the forest floor for seven years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for thoughts of violence and death

“Ms. Whelk?” Gansey says as she steps out of her car, more surprised than anything else. 

Whelk stops in front of her, peering for a moment at the Camaro before focusing her attention back on Gansey. “I want that book of yours. And you’d better give me your cell phone, too.”

Time doesn’t seem to be working correctly. Gansey realizes she’s more distressed by the illogical situation than she is by what Whelk is asking for. “Excuse me?”

“That book you bring to class. And your cell phone. Hurry up.” As she speaks, Whelk pulls a small pistol from her jacket pocket and points it steadily at Gansey.

“Well. Okay.” She’s quite certain that it isn’t the right thing to say, but she doesn’t have a script for any situation even remotely similar to this one, and she’s frighteningly low on words, so she does the simplest thing that comes to her mind and states a relevant fact. “My journal’s in the car.”

“Get it. Don’t think about trying to take off in that,” Whelk says, though it seems to Gansey that she should realize that it would be useless for Gansey to try to start the car at this moment. She leans into the back to rummage for the journal and barely hears what Whelk says next. “I also want to know where you’ve been going this week.”

“Pardon?” She says, emerging from the car with the journal held to her chest, together with her cell phone. She tries not to think about the fact that in a few moments it will no longer be in her possession. She tries to make that matter less. 

“Don’t push me. The police called the school. I can’t believe it. After seven years. Now there’s going to be a million questions. It’s only going to take them two seconds to answer a lot of those questions with my name. This is all on you. Seven years and I thought I was -- I’m screwed. You’ve screwed me.”

Gansey wishes desperately that her brain would move at its usual pace, but the events of the evening have made her thoughts sluggish and it’s only with considerable effort that she is able to postpone the shutdown that she knows will inevitably hit. Seven years, she thinks. Seven years, and the police calling. Leah’s bones in the woods, the abandoned car, a teacher who always seemed too curious about Gansey’s quest. Eve’s suspicion that someone has been watching them. But most of all, Leah’s bones, settled in the dirt of the forest floor for seven years. “Ms. Whelk --”

Whelk cuts her off. “Tell me where you’ve been.”

It doesn’t even occur to her to lie. “Up the mountains near Nethers.” 

“What did you find? Did you find Glyndower?”   


Gansey is momentarily unpleasantly thrown by the sound of her queen’s name in the mouth of someone she hates. “No. We found a carving in the ground.” Whelk makes a gesture toward the journal and Gansey only hugs it closer to her chest. She knows she should care more about the gun pointed in her direction than the idea of losing an object, but it’s hers and she loves it and she doesn’t feel capable of being smart about anything right now. “Whelk -- ma’am -- are you sure this is the only way?”

“No. This is the other way.” Whelk takes another step towards her and presses the end of pistol to her forehead. The metal is cold against her skin. Gansey thinks: if Whelk fires it, the metal will be hot. A miniature explosion in a dark, confined space and then -- hot metal and herself no longer alive to feel it. She lets Whelk take the journal and tries not to choke. 

“If you’d just asked, I would’ve told you everything in there. I would’ve been happy to. It wasn’t a secret.” And it’s true, Gansey has never hid her quest. She’ll tell anyone who shows even the slightest interest in Glyndower or ley lines absolutely everything she knows. This journal, one of her most prized possessions, is open to anyone who might want to read it, as long as she gets it back in the end. 

“I can’t believe that you’re saying anything when I have a gun to your head. I can’t believe you would bother to say that.” The look Whelk is giving Gansey exceeds any she has ever received in her life in terms of sheer spite and venom, and this is significant because many people in Gansey’s life have hated her a great deal.

She replies simply, “That’s how you know it’s the truth.”

“You disgust me. You think you’re invincible. Guess what. So did I.” And something in Whelk’s look shifts very slightly, now not only hateful but also ready to act on that hate. It’s a shift that Gansey has witnessed before, and so she recognizes it and reacts. She has only the time it takes her to curl her hand into a fist to try to remember everything Ronan ever taught her about fighting before she’s moving her arm, trying to imitate the perfect arc of Ronan’s in a fight, and then her knuckles hit metal with greater force than she’d realized she was exerting. She hadn’t been thinking about how much it would hurt, which Ronan had told her was important. She simply hadn’t had time. As she hears the gun hit the ground, she thinks it hurts more than it ought to, but she doesn’t contemplate this, just kicks the gun away from Whelk, who is throwing herself to the ground in pursuit of it. 

She scrambles around to the other side of the Camaro and crouches in the ditch next to the road, hoping the tall grass will hide her. Under the car, she can see headlights approaching and hear Whelk’s voice swearing, followed by the slam of a car door and the revving of an engine. She lies down, looking up at the night sky. Whelk is driving away, and she is here, alive, alone in the darkness. Desperately she tries not to think about the fact that one way or another, she will be dead before the next St. Mark’s Eve. For the next eleven months, it is necessary to find a way for that not to matter. She closes her eyes and takes a deep, shuddering breath, aware that she’s going to start shutting down any minute now. She tells herself that she’ll drag herself through it, that she’s done it before, that soon enough she’ll get back into the Pig and drive to Henrietta. But not yet. 


	12. Gansey Week #3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When she finishes inside the hospital, she decides to wait in the Camaro so that they’ll have a little privacy when Eve comes out. The keyring she keeps turning over in her hand does little to still the racing of her heart. Breathing exercises are useless. This fear is just going to keep making its nest in her ribcage until the day is over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is entirely unproofread for now! I'll probably do corrections tomorrow. I apologize for the erratic schedule lately!
> 
> Warning for discussion of abuse

Gansey is good at dealing with the people in the hospital. She recognizes most of the administrative people she speaks to in the process of getting Eve released because she’d seen them just the day before when she’d broken her thumb, so she can smile pleasantly and call them by name without checking their nametags. It’s nice, right now, to have something she’s good at. Remembering names, filling out paperwork, explaining away why she’s paying the bills. As much as she’s looking forward to seeing Eve safe and whole (don’t think about her ear, Gansey tells herself, don’t think about the concussion she miraculously didn’t have), the conversation they’re going to have will be anything but simple. All Gansey wants is for something to be simple for one whole day. 

When she finishes inside the hospital, she decides to wait in the Camaro so that they’ll have a little privacy when Eve comes out. The keyring she keeps turning over in her hand does little to still the racing of her heart. Breathing exercises are useless. This fear is just going to keep making its nest in her ribcage until the day is over. When Eve finally pulls open the passenger seat door and gets in, Gansey is relieved that at least the wait is over.

“Hey Parrish.” The words immediately feel wrong in her mouth. Ronan calls Eve by her last name often enough, but Gansey doesn’t often do it. Now, it feels full of false girl’s school camaraderie. “They told me you didn’t have insurance. I took care of it.” Now she wishes she hadn’t said that either. She could have left it implied, but instead she’d touched the wound with her clumsy hands and she can be certain that Eve will feel the sting. 

“You win,” Eve says softly. “Take me to get my stuff.”

“I didn’t win anything. Do you think this is how I wanted it?” She tries to make it sound like a rhetorical question, but some masochistic part of her wants to know what Eve really sees when she looks at Gansey. 

“Yes, yes I do.”

Gansey wants to cry, so she gets pissed instead. She feels like Ronan. “Don’t be shitty.”

“I’m telling you that you can say ‘I told you so.’ Say ‘if you left earlier, this wouldn’t have happen.’” The dead tone of her voice frightens Gansey, so she stays indignant, though she keeps her own voice even.

“Did I say that before? You don’t have to act like it’s the end of the world?”

“It is the end of the world.”

When Gansey looks at her, it’s like Eve isn’t even there. Her voice, her eyes, her hands, are all empty and she is gone, gone, gone. Gansey swallows back her terror and says, “Moving out of your dad’s place is the end of the world?”

“You know what I wanted. You know this wasn’t it.”

“You act like it’s my fault.” It’s petty and whiny and she knows it, but she can’t help herself.

“Tell me you’re unhappy about how this is going down.”

It takes Gansey a moment to respond. If there’s anything that could override her concern for Eve’s well being, it’s this. From where she’s sitting, it sounds an awful lot like confirmation that Eve really does hate her. Still, she manages to say, “I’m unhappy about how this is going down.”

“Whatever. You’ve wanted me to move out forever.”

“Not like this,” Gansey says, and she looks at Eve, trying to communicate by expression if not by words how fucking  _ sorry  _ she is that this has happened. How sorry she is that anything bad has ever happened to Eve. But Eve won’t look up, so Gansey turns back to look over the dashboard. “At least you have a place to go. ‘End of the world’...What is your  _ problem, _ Eve? I mean, is there something about my place that’s too repugnant for you to imagine living there?  Why is it that everything kind I do is pity to you? Everything is charity.” She can’t bring herself to say,  _ it’s not charity, Eve. It’s love. It’s always been love.  _ It’s too much, too big and clumsy a thing to say. So she says, “Well, here it is: I’m  _ sick  _ of tiptoeing around your principles.”

“God, I’m sick of your condescension, Gansey. Don’t try to make me feel stupid. Who whips out  _ repugnant _ ? Don’t pretend you’re not trying to make me feel stupid.”

“This is the way I talk,” Gansey says, on the verge of tears. She’s never going to be someone that Eve can like, at least not in a simple way, not in a way that doesn’t involve fighting and shitty communication and words not even meant to wound landing like bullets. She wants to scream and writhe and beat her fists against the steering wheel. Not like Ronan, not real violence, not a focused beam of wrath that will destroy anything its path, but a useless and messy energy that curdles in her chest and takes away all her control. When her voice returns to her, it’s thin and shaking and too high. “I’m sorry your father never taught you the meaning of  _ repugnant _ . He was too busy smashing your head against the wall of your trailer while you apologized for being alive.” 

The words are out, and she can’t take them back. Gansey feels hollowed out. She can’t bring herself to look at Eve.

“Fuck you, Gansey. Fuck you.” 

She doesn’t even turn to look when Eve gets out and slams the door behind her. For a moment she closes her eyes and tells herself,  _ you cannot go away right now.  _ When she opens her eyes again, Eve is walking across the parking lot. Turning the key in the ignition, she hurries to pull out of her parking spot and pull up alongside her friend, slowing to a crawl and rolling her window down to speak to her. 

“Where are you going?” She asks, and when no reply comes, “Where do you have to go?” Eve doesn’t look at her, just keeps walking with her eyes ahead, dead on her feet. “Eve, just tell me not back there.” She hates it when her voice cracks, but she lets it happen, just this once. “It doesn’t have to be Monmouth, but let me take you wherever you’re going.” 

When she stops walking, Gansey hits the brakes and waits the several seconds it takes before Eve begins moving again, this time around the hood of the car to get back into the passenger seat. She looks more defeated than ever when she says, “It doesn’t matter how you say it. It’s what you wanted, in the end. All your things in one place, all under your roof. Everything you own right where you can see…”

Gansey doesn’t reply because she doesn’t have any words and even if she did, they’d be the wrong ones, she’d regret them the instant she heard them, they’d make Eve hate her even more. Just get to the end of the day, she tells herself. Eve won’t look at you like that in the morning. It will be better. Still, it takes her the entire trip to the trailer park and then to Aglionby, where they’re picking up Ronan, to put away the hurt of those sentences. She can’t understand what it is that she did or said to make Eve imagine that she could ever think of Eve and and Ronan and Leah as her things. Maybe she’s forgetting something. Maybe she’s forgotten a dozen things. She hates how often in her fights with Eve she feels like she’s missed something, like she’s remembering an entirely different version of the past. But she’s gotten good at finding ways to tuck the pain of it into the back of her mind to be retrieved and agonized over on some insomniac night. But she doesn’t have the luxury of thinking about it right now. There are too many motions to go through before she can finally put her head down on her pillow and fail to sleep.


	13. Leah Week #1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They hardly seem to miss her, and it makes her wonder if it’s her being a ghost that it so easy to ignore her absence or if she’s always been this forgettable. She doesn’t know whether to be comforted or disappointed by the fact that Ronan does seem to miss her. On the one hand it’s proof that at least someone wants her around and notices when she’s gone, but on the other it means that there’s probably nothing supernatural about how the others go on with their lives when she goes away. On the whole, she thinks she has to be glad about it because there’s always a flutter at her heart when she sees the unusually toothy, earnest grin that flashes over Ronan’s face when Leah comes out of her room after going away for a while. She loves it, the slap on the back, the elbow in her ribs, all the love and affection of a kid, which is what Ronan is around her, and no one else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aka the one where my roah is really showing

Leah misses peanut butter. She misses a lot of things about being alive but sometimes she finds that it’s easier to miss one thing with all her energy than to be consumed by how much she misses everything. It’s easier to miss silly things, little things, the taste of peanut butter, than it is to miss the feeling of not being dead. 

So today she’s thinking about the taste of it on her tongue, the satisfying crunch of the peanuts in the chunky kind, how she used to eat it out of the jar as she sat on her Aglionby dorm bed and listened to Whelk. But thinking about Whelk leaves a sour taste in her mouth, though truth be told she still misses her old friend. It’s been easier since Gansey and her girls showed up. Leah is like Ronan in that she has always needed someone to follow, a kind of human polaris to orient her in the world, and Gansey serves this function well, and Ronan, by her similar nature, makes Leah a little less lonely. And though she might not need Eve the way she needs the other two, she likes her. She doesn’t quite understand her, though, which is strange, because part of being dead is sort of understanding everyone. It’s not a power she can really explain or even wrap her head around, but she knows what people are doing even when she isn’t there, can tell what they are feeling, what they are thinking. But it’s imperfect, like memory, and for whatever reason, Eve is more difficult than the others. She remembers once when Eve came to Monmouth with a bruise on her cheek just like her own, and Leah had reached up to touch it and said, “Twins.” Eve had flinched away and Leah thought no, we are not the same. 

But they all fit together, more or less, have their own distinct places in the hierarchy. Gansey wouldn’t like it if she knew that Leah thinks of it as a hierarchy, but that’s what it is. It’s never bothered her. She loves them and she fits with them but all the same, she goes away for a day because she’s consumed by jealousy after seeing Ronan eating a peanut butter sandwich. Her jealousy isn’t the same as Ronan’s, it isn’t harsh or spiteful, but she’s aware that it makes her singularly unpleasant. It brings out the worst in her, the way she shrinks away from the living world even as she exists in it. So sometimes she decides not to exist in it at all, just blinks out and comes back hours, days, later to find the others much the same as they’ve always been. They hardly seem to miss her, and it makes her wonder if it’s her being a ghost that it so easy to ignore her absence or if she’s always been this forgettable. She doesn’t know whether to be comforted or disappointed by the fact that Ronan  _ does  _ seem to miss her. On the one hand it’s proof that at least someone wants her around and notices when she’s gone, but on the other it means that there’s probably nothing supernatural about how the others go on with their lives when she goes away. On the whole, she thinks she has to be glad about it because there’s always a flutter at her heart when she sees the unusually toothy, earnest grin that flashes over Ronan’s face when Leah comes out of her room after going away for a while. She loves it, the slap on the back, the elbow in her ribs, all the love and affection of a kid, which is what Ronan is around her, and no one else. 

After the peanut butter incident, she comes back to a still and silent Monmouth, unsure of how much time has passed. She’s a little unsettled by the fact that everyone in the apartment seems to be sleeping. It’s a rare thing. Gansey is definitely asleep, breathing quietly and evenly in her bed, but as she moves soundlessly across the floor of the main room, Leah thinks she sees a little light coming from under Ronan’s door. Despite Ronan’s strict rule against anyone entering her space, Leah puts her hand on the doorknob and turns it. She has a feeling that something is going wrong in this bedroom. When she pushes the door open, she sees the light still on but Ronan asleep, her body twitching under her thin blanket. It’s a nightmare, she knows, and in Ronan’s head and hands, a nightmare is a dangerous thing. Settling herself on her knees beside the low frame of Ronan’s bed, Leah reaches out a hand and grips Ronan’s shoulder, shaking her slightly and saying her name. “Ronan. Ronan wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”

Ronan jerks awake, making a noise that was less a yell and more a whimper. Leah can see in her eyes the moment when she snaps back into the real world, though clearly the nightmare still has a grip on her bones, the way she’s shaking. Moving as if in a trance, she turns to Leah and blinks. “You’re not supposed to be in my fucking room,” she says, but the usual edge to her voice is missing, so Leah stays put, unintimidated. Ronan sighs and sits up, rubbing her hands over her shaved head. “Why do you lock yourself up like that?” And then, when Leah doesn’t answer, “How do you know when to come back out?”

Leah shrugs. “I guess I know when you need me.”

Ronan snorts, but she doesn’t deny it. 

“You want me to stay?”

Ronan doesn’t answer but she scoots over in the bed to make space for Leah to join her. Leah gets up to turn out the light then lies down next to Ronan and they are still together in the darkness, their breaths falling into sync. It’s a good moment. It’s a little, Leah thinks, like being alive. Being so close to someone. It’s difficult to be that way when you’re dead. She reaches out to take Ronan’s hand and finds it unmoving. Ronan is asleep. Leah holds her hand anyway and wishes she could fall asleep too. In the absence of that possibility, she stays in Ronan’s bed until dawn, counting the beats of her pulse against the inside of her wrist.    
  



	14. Leah Week #2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s one of her better qualities, she thinks – the ease with which she forgives the faults of those she loves, and she does her best not to think about that fact that at least some part of it is cowardice, an unwillingness to face the fear that if she doesn’t accept what little love is given to her for free, she’ll never have any at all.

This is what Leah remembers about being 16 and alive.

She knows, in some part of her mind, that Whelk isn’t really a good friend. But she knows it in the way that a person can know that their dog isn’t very well behaved or that their mother is a gossip; that is, she knew it with love and even found herself a little endeared by it. One of her sisters will ask why her friend never writes or calls during the vacations, and Leah will laugh a little and will say  _ oh, you know, that’s just Barra.  _ It’s one of her better qualities, she thinks – the ease with which she forgives the faults of those she loves, and she does her best not to think about that fact that at least some part of it is cowardice, an unwillingness to face the fear that if she doesn’t accept what little love is given to her for free, she’ll never have any at all.

Her grades are mediocre, but she doesn’t care. It’s good enough for her lenient parents, will be good enough, she thinks, for the second-tier colleges she wants to go to. She’ll graduate from Aglionby and she doesn’t really need credentials other than that. It’s not like she’s ever had big dreams. All she really wants is a job that doesn’t make her miserable and gets her enough money for groceries and rent. There is in her no longing for prestige or magic, she isn’t like Whelk. But like so many without ambition, she is magnetically attracted to those with an excess of it, as though they might balance each other out. It doesn’t really work like that.

She remembers feelings like warmth, a full stomach, waking up after a good night’s sleep, trivial things that she misses to the point of tears. She finds ways of mimicking them: pressing close to Ronan or Blue, lying all night in her bed with her eyes closed, zoning in and out, but the memory remains too sharp for these to be entirely satisfying.

The only things worse that what she remembers are the things she’s forgotten.

She can’t remember the sound of her mother’s voice or why she’d bought that red Mustang or exactly who she was when she wasn’t dead. While she remembers that she used to get butterflies in her stomach when Whelk touched her, she can’t remember what the actual sensation was like. She thinks Ronan must love Gansey the way she’d loved Whelk, so she tried asking her once but Ronan had just gotten pissed and walked away. She can’t remember not being scared.

It’s been seven years, and the more time goes by, the more she holds onto things that haven’t changed. It’s why she likes to lie on the roof of Monmouth at night and look at the stars, their places according to the seasons as familiar as they always have been. She meets Gansey up there one night. Gansey had apparently been expecting to be alone, because when she sees Leah she almost turns and goes back inside, but when she realizes that Leah has already noticed her, she stays and comes to lie next to her without saying a word. After a while Leah says, “You don’t come up here often, huh?”

Gansey shakes her head, then clears her throat before speaking. “Usually when I can’t sleep I stay downstairs and work on my model Henrietta. Being outside at night makes me feel –” She stops, clears her throat again. “Ronan’s damn bird is making a truly unholy racket down there, I couldn’t stand the noise of it. I was actually sleeping before it started up.”

Leah cringes. “I can’t wait until it’s old enough to be a little quieter.”

“Yeah,” Gansey says, and they lapse into silence a while longer. Then Gansey says, “I think it’s good for Ronan, though. Having something to look after.”

“You’d know all about that,” Leah says, and out of her peripheral vision she sees Gansey turn sharply to look at her, but she keeps her eyes fixed on the sky, and doesn’t elaborate. Gansey doesn’t ask what she means by it. Leah thinks that maybe nighttime Gansey is wiser than the daytime version of herself. 

“I like looking at the stars,” Gansey says. “I should do it more often. I like looking at things that will always be there.”

“I like looking at things that have always been there,” Leah says, and Gansey laughs a little, sadly, and they both know why though they don’t say it. 

“It’s not true though,” Gansey says. “They’re not permanent, any more than we are. But their lifespans seem to us so vast that we call them eternal.” 

“The others,” Leah says. “They don’t like it when you talk like that.”

Gansey laughs again, a hollow sound. “I don’t think they like it when I talk at all.”

“I like it,” Leah says, and she glances at Gansey to see her lips quirk a little. In the silence that follows, Leah knows without hearing or seeing that Gansey is crying. There’s a miserable tug at her gut and she thinks how funny they are, two dead girls stargazing on a pretty spring night. Two dead girls, for all intents and purposes. She wonders if she should feel bitter about Glyndower’s bargain, the trade of her life for Gansey’s. Maybe she should, but she doesn’t and can’t. All she feels is sorry that Gansey will be gone too, and soon. She doesn’t want Gansey to have to feel the way she feels. Reaching out, she takes Gansey’s hand, and she lies. “Hey,” she says. “It’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.”

She can’t bring herself to contradict Gansey’s hushed, “No, I won’t.” Instead, she just squeezes Gansey’s warm hand and hopes that it’s enough and knows that it isn’t. She was wrong, she thinks, when she’d thought that Gansey was like Whelk. They should have been the same, but they aren’t, and she loves Gansey for that fiercely. 

After a while she says, “Maybe not, but you’re gonna be okay tonight.” Gansey doesn’t reply, but Leah decides that she believes it enough for both of them. 


	15. Leah Week #3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hi Blue,” she says, and she says it like a sigh, the side of her face pressed to his chest.
> 
> “How are you?” He asks as she back away and reaches up to pet his hair.
> 
> “Oh, I’m okay,” Leah says, but she thinks her voice must sound a little strained because Blue frowns.
> 
> “What’s up?”
> 
> “I think,” she says, considering as she speaks, because she hasn’t put this into words before, “That I’m lonely.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At long last, the ridiculously late last installment of Leah Week! There's a nod to TRK spoilers in here, but not actually TRK spoilers. Ladies of Fox Way are coming soon -- they're all written, I just need to proofread them.

Leah takes an immediate liking to Blue. She meets him after the others because while she’d seen him at Nino’s, she hadn’t spoken to him, and she hadn’t been at the reading with the others. But as soon as she meets him, she loves him. He isn’t like any of the girls, not at all. He’s somehow lighter than any of them it it makes her wonder if she’s ended up with Ronan and Gansey and Eve because they all have such big sadnesses to carry around with them, like she does. Blue isn’t like that. Blue lives in a big strange house with about a million women, as far as Leah can tell, and he likes to sew and knit and paint things, and he can sleep through the night. When he smiles at her it’s a big, warm, soft smile, and it’s easy to like him in a way that it isn’t easy to like her other friends. And she does like them, but it’s a complicated kind of liking. She can’t imagine abandoning them, but at the same time, it hurts to be with them. Nothing about Blue is painful. 

She waits for him in the Monmouth parking lot and sometimes Blue will show up before the others are home and they’ll talk and roll the Spongebob bouncy ball that has somehow made its home in the apartment between them. He never questions why she’s home when the others aren’t, and she’s glad of it. Somehow, no one asks those kinds of questions.

One day he gets there especially early and she hurries down the stairs to meet him after seeing him through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the old factory. She crashes into a hug, powered by the momentum of coming down the stairs two at a time. He makes an  _ oof  _ sound and nearly topples over but manages to steady himself and straightens, laughing, with his arms still around her.

“Hi Leah,” he says.

“Hi Blue,” she says, and she says it like a sigh, the side of her face pressed to his chest.

“How are you?” He asks as she back away and reaches up to pet his hair.

“Oh, I’m okay,” Leah says, but she thinks her voice must sound a little strained because Blue frowns. 

“What’s up?”

“I think,” she says, considering as she speaks, because she hasn’t put this into words before, “That I’m lonely.”

They sit down together on the curb of the parking lot. “I’m sorry, Leah,” Blue says, and he really does sound sorry. Somehow, Blue’s voice always matches the words he’s saying. That never seems to happen with the girls. 

Leah knocks her knees together. “I know I have friends. Which is lucky, because not everyone has friends. But I always feel – apart from them.”

“I understand that,” Blue says. “I feel that way a lot with the people at my school. I feel like I’m from a different planet from them.”

Leah glances over at him. “Yeah,” she says. “But you don’t feel that way with Gansey and Ronan and Eve.”

Blue makes a face. “I don’t think I’m from the same planet as Ronan.” 

They both laugh, and then Leah says, “I don’t think anyone except Ronan’s mom was from the same planet as her.”

“Why do the others like her?” Blue asks, tentative, as though worried that he’ll hurt Leah’s feelings if he’s mean about Ronan.

Leah tilts her head. “She’s beginning to adjust to life on earth.”

“Are you?” Blue asks.

“Adjusting to life on earth?”   


“Yeah.”

Leah sighs and hugs her knees to her chest. “I think that’s the problem. I don’t think I am. What’s the opposite of adjusting? Getting less okay? I’m doing that, I think.”

“That’s no good,” Blue says, and Leah nods in agreement. There’s not really anything to do about it, and they both seem to know it.

“The problem,” Leah says, “Is that it doesn’t make me feel less alone when they’re nice to me. It doesn’t matter what they do, I still feel like I don’t belong.”

Blue says, “If it makes you feel any better, I think they all love you. Even Ronan.”

Leah smiles a bit. “Especially Ronan.”

“You must know her better than me,” Blue says, and that’s true enough so Leah doesn’t say anything.

Leah puts her head on Blue’s shoulder and buries one hand deep into his hair. She makes a little sound of contentment and say, “I think you make me feel a bit less lonely. You’re so different of them. You remind me of being –” She stops herself and just hides her face in Blue’s neck.

“It’s okay to be sad,” Blue says, in the gentle tone of someone who knows how true that is, and who knows it’s important to be reminded. He puts an arm around her and rubs her shoulder. “You’re always so cold, Leah.”

“I know,” Leah says with a sigh. “I’m sorry.” They sit quietly for a while, Blue still working on the hopeless task of warming Leah up. Then Leah says, “Don’t tell any of the others what I said. About being lonely. I don’t want them to think that they’re – not enough.”

“Don’t worry,” Blue says. “I won’t breathe a word. I’m good at keeping secrets.”

Leah thinks  _ I know _ , but she doesn’t say it. Because of course, she knows about Blue’s secrets, just like she knows about Ronan’s secrets and Gansey’s secrets and Eve’s secrets. Really, it’s amazing how many of them are the same. Or almost the same. Or parallel. If she squints her eyes, it really seems like they’re all carrying around the same unspoken words. It would be easier for everyone if they would just say it out loud. But it’s not Leah’s job to make that happen. They’ll figure it out in their own time. One of the things about being dead is that sometimes you just have to sit back and watch. Just sometimes, she gets to step in a fix something, but it’s difficult and rare and when it comes to her friends, she tries to let them live their own lives. 


	16. Women of Fox Way #1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By the time they went to bed, they’d secured promises from five women to wire money for the house and to come live with them at 300 Fox Way. Maura thought it was a miracle. Calla thought it was fated. Persephone did not seem at all surprised that it had worked this way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to take a moment to note that this is technically canon compliant. Also: I'll be updating once a day through the weekend and the beginning of next week with the rest of Women of Fox Way and then non-canon compliment ship fics!

Maura, Calla, and Persephone arrived in Henrietta, Virginia quite exhausted from a trip across the country in the cars of strangers and with means that might be called modest if you were in a generous mood. They stayed the first few nights in the very cheapest and seediest motel the town had to offer, whose mattresses, Calla insisted long after, should have been burned. They began their search for a place to live immediately. While they had known each other for under a month, they never even discussed the possibility of living separately. Of course they would share a house. It seemed the natural solution. 

At first, they looked for small places. They entertained the idea of splitting an apartment. The possibility of a mobile home was investigated. But all of their financially sensible solutions fled their minds as soon as they found 300 Fox Way. It was big and colorful and rickety and had a beautiful beech tree in the backyard. It was fairly cheap as houses go ( _ a bit of a fixer-upper _ , the real estate agent had said) and it was clear that many Saturday afternoons would have to be spent stripping and replacing carpets, painting rooms, doing something with a toolkit so that the kitchen faucet wouldn’t spray water in every direction when turned on, but they were all three of them enchanted by it. They also had nowhere near enough money for it. They were close to giving up on it.

“I have no interest in being deeply in debt,” Calla said.

“Besides, there are far more rooms than there are of us,” Persephone said.

“That,” Maura said, “Gives me an idea.” And so Calla and Maura spent the rest of the day on the phone with various relatives, trying to convince them to come down to this strange little town with its strange powerful energy and this strange marvelous house. Persephone did not seem to have any relatives to call. By the time they went to bed, they’d secured promises from five women to wire money for the house and to come live with them at 300 Fox Way. Maura thought it was a miracle. Calla thought it was fated. Persephone did not seem at all surprised that it had worked this way. 

They finalized the deal for the house in record time. The real estate agent seemed a little stunned. Standing in the front hall of their new house, Maura, Calla, and Persephone regarded the various things in their direct line of sight that would need to be tended to with supplies from the Home Depot. The banister of the staircase was splintering. One window was covered not with glass but with a stretch of tarp. In the room that the hall opened out into, the only apparent light source was a single bulb hanging from the ceiling.

“Definitely a fixer-upper,” Maura said.

“I know,” Calla said. “I love it.”

With the small amount of money left from their relatives and the even smaller amount of money they had between the three of them, they bought tools and paint, carpeting and curtains. When they’d crossed everything of their list, they were absolutely broke. They spent a week living essentially off of peanut butter and splitting their time between working on the house and finding locals who would pay to have the energy of their houses cleansed. They certainly weren’t ready to do readings in their own house. Over the next months, 300 Fox Way began more and more to resemble the kind of place where people would actually like to live and relatives began to arrive and stake their claims to various rooms around the house. They brought with them sufficient funds to upgrade from peanut butter to macaroni and cheese as well as several children. They learned that eight women painting a room can finish the job considerably more quickly than three. Light fixtures were purchased, floors were scrubbed, tiling was replaced. Maura predicted, correctly, that the maintenance of the house would be an ongoing project, but by the time they celebrated their first New Year in Henrietta, they felt ready to open the house up to clients. They would never be rich, but actually being able to do tarot readings in their own living room made things considerably easier, financially. Meals became easier to come by and making payments on the mortgage stopped requiring all night debates among the women of the house to figure out where sacrifices could be made to scrounge up the money. They were settled. 

In those early years, Maura, Calla, and Persephone shared a room. Since they’d been the first arrivals, they’d gotten first pick of the rooms, and they took the one at the end of the hallway with the biggest windows and a ramshackle plastic chandelier hanging from the ceiling. They eventually got a bed frame, but that first summer it was just a king size mattress on the floor onto which they’d collapse on warm nights after days spent working on the house and looking for any work in town that involved their psychic talents. Calla would moan about her back hurting and Persephone would quietly say something about how her dissertation was languishing while, as she said, her body was busy, and Maura would close her eyes and think about how very much she loved them and how very much she loved this house and how very much she loved this town. She had not expected, when she first began hitch hiking, to end up this happy. She had stumbled into it, ended up by pure chance with these women and in this place. No, she told herself. Not chance. Something bigger. Something more powerful. Fate. That was what had brought her this happiness. She wasn’t sure how long she’d be able to hold onto it, but she was glad to have it for now. As the other women fell asleep around her, she opened her eyes to the darkness, listening to the cicadas screaming in the night, and thought to herself  _ don’t throw it away. _


	17. Women of Fox Way #2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The loosely defined something that had existed between the three of them before Artemus showed up had started during one of the endless sessions they’d spent on the roof, patching holes and cleaning the gutters and generally trying to improve the odds of the house remaining in one piece through the winter. After several hours of hard work, Calla had gone down to the kitchen to fetch beers for all of them (a rare treat that they’d gotten after a fabulously wealthy and fabulously superstitious old man had paid them a considerable amount to improve the energy flow of his enormous house on the outskirts of town) and they laid back under the shade of the beech tree and drank slowly.   
>  Persephone said, “I don’t mean to make trouble, but I do think it is a little rude for you two to kiss while I’m not around and not tell me anything about it.

Back in what Calla called  _ the good years  _ and Maura called  _ the early years  _ and Persephone called  _ that time before things got strange  _ – that is to say, before Artemus came along – these three women were even more a unit than they were in Blue’s childhood. Or maybe they were just a different kind of unit. When Blue was born and Artemus disappeared, they had to come together to care both for the child and for Maura, who was in the strange position of being both a new mother and deeply in grief. They became more practical and more grown up and though they did not love each other any less, they all became a little less  _ in love _ . But they had started being less  _ in love  _ when Maura had met Artemus because their relationship was very triangular and it’s difficult to maintain a good triangle when one of the points is head over heels with a mysterious stranger from a forest. 

The loosely defined  _ something  _ that had existed between the three of them before Artemus showed up had started during one of the endless sessions they’d spent on the roof, patching holes and cleaning the gutters and generally trying to improve the odds of the house remaining in one piece through the winter. After several hours of hard work, Calla had gone down to the kitchen to fetch beers for all of them (a rare treat that they’d gotten after a fabulously wealthy and fabulously superstitious old man had paid them a considerable amount to improve the energy flow of his enormous house on the outskirts of town) and they laid back under the shade of the beech tree and drank slowly. 

Persephone said, “I don’t mean to make trouble, but I do think it is a little rude for you too to kiss while I’m not around and not tell me anything about it.

Maura and Calla’s heads jerked sideways in mirror movements to look at Persephone, who was lying between them.

“How do you know about that?” Calla said, sounding a little angry.

“I’m sorry, we should have told you,” Maura said, sounding extremely sheepish.

“I’m not cross,” Persephone said, which relieve Maura, though it was difficult to imagine an emotion like  _ cross  _ in Persephone. “But I did want to say that it might be nice to be included.”

“Oh,” Maura said, not quite surprised but a little bit startled all the same.

Calla considered. “That’s not a bad idea.”

“Only if you’d like to include me, of course,” Persephone clarified.

Maura realized that she  _ did  _ want to include Persephone, very much, but somehow she hadn’t admitted it to herself until just now. “I would,” Maura said. “As long as Calla would.” 

And Calla did. It was remarkably easy to move from two of them kissing to three of them kissing, and they didn’t bother to label it more precisely than that. They didn’t even think much about what it was. They were quite simply  _ together. _ They lived in one house and slept in one bed and ate their meals together and it just made sense to all of them. At least it did back then. They had all agreed that they were allowed to see other people if it ever came up, but none of them had really been expecting it to come up. Undeniably, something about them had broken when Maura started seeing Artemus. They had agreed that they were allowed to date other people, but they hadn’t agreed that they were allowed to fall madly in love with other people. But falling madly in love isn’t something you can tell a person not to do, so Calla and Persephone accepted it, and they accepted it when Artemus vanished, though Persephone did so with more good grace – or perhaps only with more vagueness – than Calla. 

While their relationship changed after Artemus, they remained firmly a  _ unit _ . Maura was fairly certain at this point that nothing short of death could shake that. They had their own bedrooms now, and they kissed each other less often these days (though they had not entirely stopped), but they were still  _ together _ . They still belonged to one another, and now they had a child. In the absence of a father, they thought three mothers would do just fine, and that was what they were to Blue. Sometimes, on sad or lonely nights, they would all end up back in the queen bed in the room that was now just Maura’s and curl up together as they had in the old days, Persephone’s head resting on Maura’s chest, Maura’s legs tangled up with Calla’s. After Artemus had disappeared, Maura had had a brief spell of terror, thinking that she would be alone for the rest of her life. But it quickly became clear that she would never be alone, not the way some people were. She would always have these women, who had from the beginning loved her better than Artemus ever had, and, somewhat to her surprise, they still did. Maura wasn’t sure she deserved them. But in the end, that didn’t matter, because she needed them, and they would love her regardless. 

As Blue was growing up, Maura wondered sometimes if she should explain her history with Calla and Persephone to him, but she found that she didn’t need to. He might not know specifics, but he understood better than most adults did what they meant to each other. It was the most natural thing in the world to him that his mothers held hands and sometimes piled together in one big bed and kissed each other. It was how they existed as a family, and always had. Maura felt unbelievably lucky to have a child who so easily accepted what even to her sometimes seemed difficult and complicated. But then, Blue had always understood love better than anyone else she knew, even when he was very young. The prediction of the death of his true love broke her heart because she understood that he would be the kind to love entirely and faithfully and for life. That such a love would be cursed seemed unspeakably cruel to Maura. She could only hope that the love of his family would carry him through somehow. 


	18. Women of Fox Way #3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Though she had been only three years old, she had already decided that she didn’t like change. After a few years had passed, she decided she was an enormous fan of change but that she didn’t like Henrietta because there wasn’t enough ice cream there. Over the course of the next decade, she found better ways to procure ice cream but found that she didn’t want to live in Virginia because it wasn’t a very good place to be a lesbian. But if she had to be in this state, 300 Fox Way was as good a place to be as any.

Orla was not born in Henrietta. She was one of the small children brought along to 300 Fox Way when Maura and Calla had invited their relatives, including Orla’s mother Jimi, to join them in Virginia. She had not been happy about the move. Though she had been only three years old, she had already decided that she didn’t like change. After a few years had passed, she decided she was an enormous fan of change but that she didn’t like Henrietta because there wasn’t enough ice cream there. Over the course of the next decade, she found better ways to procure ice cream but found that she didn’t want to live in Virginia because it wasn’t a very good place to be a lesbian. But if she had to be in this state, 300 Fox Way was as good a place to be as any. Given that all the women there were psychic and a healthy number of them were Sapphic, she didn’t have to worry about judgment of lack of acceptance at home. Her coming out at sixteen to the entire population of the house at once when they were gathering for dinner was greeted with friendly nods, a slap on the back from Calla, and a brief and slightly confused burst of applause from Persephone. Later that evening, Orla’s mother thanked her for being open about it, and that was that. 

It was difficult to find women in the immediate area, but the golden age of Orla’s love life began when she discovered online dating. Orla was perfectly capable of capturing her considerable beauty on camera, and her psychic abilities helped her steer clear of creeps. Mostly she just flirted and would occasionally drive a little way out of town for a date, but she also had an undeniable allure that brought moonstruck women flocking from miles away to bring her flowers and candy and favors of other sorts. But, she said, she was waiting to move out and start her own practice before she started looking for a serious relationship. She was grateful, in the end, to have been brought up at 300 Fox Way, but she didn’t want to stay here forever. Her dream was to save up money and move out, start up a little storefront place with a phone line and online service – she wanted to be a truly modern psychic. In the meantime, she could use her charms, which appealed to both men and women despite her complete lack of interest in the former, on the psychic phone line which she had not so much convinced her family to allow her to install as conned them into allowing her to keep it. Blue made endless fun of what he called her “phone sex voice,” but she found there was a certain pleasure in using it on men who were paying for the sound of her on the other end of the line while she painted her nails and thought  _ you don’t even understand how unattainable I am for you.  _

Orla did not hate life at Fox Way. There had been long stretches of her adolescence when she had, but had outgrown this. She loved her family, even if she and Blue were in constant spats. They would never be bosom friends, but she would always watch out for him. She had developed a fondness for this odd old house and she knew that if she left ( _ when,  _ she told herself, not  _ if _ ) she would miss the community of it, but she knew with just as much certainty that her ambition would never let her stay in Henrietta. It wasn’t ambition like Neeve’s – she didn’t care all that much about being famous or even really about being well-respected, but she did want to be independent. She wanted to live in a big city and have her own life and a girlfriend. She wanted the money she earned to be her own. She wanted to decide how to spend it. It was just a matter of saving enough money to move out, which was no simple matter in a home like this. But Orla was patient, and she was tenacious, and she had a good feeling about her plans. Unlike most people, she could actually trust that this meant something. 

It was strange to watch Blue growing up, dreaming of going to college, of becoming a biologist, of travelling the world. She wanted much smaller things than he did, and part of her wanted to warn him that if you started to want a thing it was a lot harder to stop and go back to being happy with what you had than if you never wanted it in the first place. But she knew she couldn’t tell him to stop wishing for a world bigger than Henrietta, especially since that was exactly what she wanted, if on less grand of a scale. She watched him making friends with Aglionby girls and she tried to tell him, as kindly as she could, that he was chasing after heartache. Of course, he didn’t take advice from her – he never had. She couldn’t really blame him. He was more like her than he realized – independent, determined, and insistent on choosing a future instead of accepting the one laid out by a deck of cards or the lines of the palm or the stars. She knew, though, that if she tried to tell him this, he would make a variety of indignant noises and say something along the lines of “I am  _ not _ like you.” She let him believe that. It was hard not to be afraid for him, though, because she often did readings for everyone at Fox Way, and she could read terrible sadness coming for him, drawing near now. But there was always a little glimmer of hope at the end, which was why she never did much to interfere. That and a lifetime of being told by the older women that trying to change a bad fate could often just bring it about faster. It was comforting to be find signs again and against that somehow – whether by changing the course of events or by finding unexpected strength within himself, or maybe both – Blue was going to end up happy. 


	19. Gansey/Eve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gansey bites her tongue to stop herself from saying something ridiculous like you’re pretty or let’s go make out in the stacks. “Nothing.”

Gansey is aware that she should probably be worrying about Ronan. She should usually be worrying about Ronan. But she lets it go this once because it’s not often that she knows she should be worrying and manages not to. It’s not often that she’s not worrying, period. Anyway, she’s pretty sure that Ronan is with Leah, and even if they do stupid things together, she’s pretty sure that Leah won’t let Ronan do anything so spectacularly dumb that she’d actually get hurt. It was a miracle that she’d managed to drag Ronan to the library for any period of time, and she’d actually done her Latin homework, so Gansey feels like she’s fulfilled her duties for the day. Which means she’s allowed to sit here and not worry about Ronan and look at Eve instead. She’s lucky that Eve is such a dedicated student, because her attention to her work means that Gansey can stare for long periods without getting caught. It’s a dangerous indulgence, she knows, and a foolish one. Besides, it means that she isn’t getting any of her considerable amount of homework done. It’s not like her grades are in danger, she thinks, trying to justify it to herself. Her eyes go back down to her calculus worksheet when Eve’s flick up, though not fast enough. She can feel her cheeks burning when Eve says, “You alright, Gansey?”   


“Yeah of course,” Gansey says, pointedly keeping her eyes fixed on the paper. 

“What are you working on?”   


“Um. Math?”

“I can see that, I meant more specifically.”

It occurs to Gansey at this point that she has no idea what the worksheet is about. Deciding that honesty is the best policy, she says, “I’m really not entirely sure.”

“I wondered. You seem sort of out of it.”

“Just distracted.”

“Ronan?”   


“What? Oh, no. She’s fine. She’s probably throwing eggs from the roof with Leah again. It’s their new hobby.”

“Expensive,” Eve comments, and Gansey hums in assent. “What is it, then?”   


Gansey bites her tongue to stop herself from saying something ridiculous like  _ you’re pretty  _ or  _ let’s go make out in the stacks.  _ “Nothing.”

“Gansey. You just said you were distracted.”

“Oh. You know. Glyndower.”

“Should have guessed,” Eve says, and returns to her homework. 

Gansey watches as Eve’s hair sweeps over her face and as she reaches to tuck it behind her ear. “Gansey,” she say nonchalantly, “I can tell you’re watching me.” Gansey makes an inarticulate flustered noise as Eve looks up again. “You’re really not that subtle.”

“I’m sorry,” Gansey says, bright pink. “I’ll stop.”

“I don’t mind,” Eve says, making a show of pulling her textbook toward her. “It’s sort of nice. To be looked at like that.” Gansey can’t decide whether she wants to hide on the table or press the issue further. Luckily for her, she doesn’t have to choose because Eve continues, still staring at her textbook though she clearly isn’t reading it. “I don’t think I’d mind if you kissed me, either.”

“Oh?” Gansey asks, surprised that she’s actually capable of making a sound.

“There’s a little nook by the agriculture section where no one ever goes because. You know. No one here cares about agriculture.”

“Except Ronan.”

“Luckily, Ronan isn’t here.” Eve finally looks up from her book and there’s something wary in her eyes. Gansey realizes that Eve isn’t sure whether or not she’s overstepped.

She does a very poor job of biting down a smile as she says, “Eve Parrish, have you been scouting the library for makeout spots?”   


Eve blushes and Gansey thinks how unfair it is that it only makes her prettier. “I just noticed that it’s a quiet spot.” 

Surprised that her giddiness isn’t affecting her voice, Gansey says, “Do you think your history homework will survive without you if you took a, ah, brief vacation to the agriculture section?” 

“I think it probably would,” Eve says, slow and thoughtful, like she’s really considering the question. “Only one way to find out, I guess.” And she shuts her book and gets up, heading toward the agriculture section. It takes Gansey a moment to shut her book and follow her, because the more she thinks about this, the more there is no possible way on earth that this is actually happening to her. She scrambles out of her chair and catches up to Eve, grabbing her hand. There’s something she has to ask before she lets this go any further. 

“Eve?” She says, and for the first time, she fails completely at hiding her emotions. She sounds, she realizes, frightened and nervous and messy and she wishes she could tuck all of that back behind her Aglionby blouse. 

“Yeah?” Eve says, turning to her, concerned. They’re standing in an aisle of books, out of sight of the desks in the open area of the library. 

“When you said before, you wouldn’t mind me kissing you --” She pauses and concentrates hard on saying the next part without sounding pathetic. “Did you mean you wanted me to kiss you, or just that, I don’t know, you knew I wanted to and you’re bored and sad because of Blue and just want to be kissed and --” 

She’s cut off when Eve moves forward, burying both hands in Gansey’s hair and kissing her hard. There’s a pure, silent moment where Gansey doesn’t think anything at all before she reaches up to put her arms around Eve and kiss her back, the tip of her tongue running along Eve’s bottom lip. Eve pulls back only to kiss her again, and again before she runs her thumb over Gansey’s lips. “In case that didn’t make it clear enough,” she says, “I meant that I wanted to kiss you and I couldn’t come up with a better way to say it.”

“That’s okay,” Gansey says, a little breathless. “I think I get the message.”

“I’d be happy to keep explaining, you know.”

“Mmm,” Gansey hums soft and low. “That sounds like a good plan.” And Eve pulls her closer to kiss her again. 


	20. Leah/Ronan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan is drinking her beer slowly, spending a lot of time fiddling with bottle, like she got it from the fridge more for the comfort of having something in her hands than for the sake of drinking it. “So,” she says, stretching her legs out and watching Leah. “What else can you do? Foxtrot? Charleston? Lindy fucking hop?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for mentions of alcohol dependence

        Ronan says, “You’re fucking kidding me.”

“Nope,” Leah says, with a slightly impish grin.

“Like, ballroom dancing?”

Leah shrugs. “Kind of. Social dance. All sorts.”

“Wait, dude, does this mean you can waltz?”

“Among other things.”

Ronan snorts into her beer bottle. “I bet Gansey does too. You two should waltz together.”

“I could teach you.”

“Or I could kill you again.”

“Rude,” Leah says. They’re sitting on the floor of the main room of Monmouth Manufacturing and Leah is telling Ronan about what’s changed since her days at Aglionby, including the fact that there used to be required dancing lessons. Gansey and Eve are still at the library doing their homework, and Leah had had little trouble luring Ronan away from the study party. Leah doesn’t feel too guilty about it because it’s not like Ronan ever gets anything done in the library anyway, and she’d been lonely. It’s fun to get drunk with Ronan – well, they can’t exactly get drunk together but she likes watching Ronan get drunk, and she doesn’t work as hard to control her impulses after Ronan’s had a few drinks.

She’s glad because tonight Ronan isn’t drinking to get drunk. It’s not the way she is sometimes, stumbling into the kitchen for the bottle of vodka to obliterate her thoughts. Nights like that, she just lies splayed in bed with loud music on and Leah goes into her room despite the noise and sits next to her on the bed to make sure she’s okay. Usually, Ronan is only marginally aware of her. Tonight isn’t like that, though. Ronan is drinking her beer slowly, spending a lot of time fiddling with bottle, like she got it from the fridge more for the comfort of having something in her hands than for the sake of drinking it. “So,” she says, stretching her legs out and watching Leah. “What else can you do? Foxtrot? Charleston? Lindy fucking hop?”

“Yeah.”

“You still remember?”

“Muscle memory, I guess.”

“I guess.”

“You don’t even want to learn for the sake of surprising Gansey one of these days? I think it’d be pretty funny.”

“Okay, fair,” Ronan says, setting down her bottle. She stands and holds her hand out to Leah, who takes it. Ronan pulls her to her feet with more force than Leah had been expecting – more force than is really needed to move a ghost – and she crashes into Ronan’s chest. “Ouch,” Ronan says, but without much feeling. “I seriously don’t understand how you can leave bruises.”

“You don’t know nearly enough about physics or metaphysics to understand,” Leah says, and Ronan lets out a bark of a laugh. Leah likes touching Ronan. Gansey and Eve are strong too, Gansey from being on the rowing team and Eve from her physically demanding jobs, but neither of them have Ronan’s athletic grace. She’s all smooth lines and liquid motion, the kind of elegance that comes from hours of practicing the precise movements of a boxer. _Elegance_ is a word most people would associate with Eve out of the three of them, but Ronan has it too.

“Okay, follow my lead,” Leah says, and smiles as Ronan looks down at their feet, her brow furrowed in concentration as she moves with Leah. “One, two, three, one, two, three,” she counts as they begin to move around the room. Ronan gets the hang of it pretty quickly, which doesn’t surprise Leah. When it comes to physical things, Ronan is always a fast learner. It’s more her language than English is. “You’re pretty good at this.”

“Shut up, Leah,” Ronan says, with no sting.

“Now you can sweep Gansey off her feet,” Leah says with a grin.

“I dunno,” Ronan says, watching their feet again though a moment ago she hadn’t been having any trouble. “I’m pretty happy sweeping you off your feet.” A sharp grin spreads across her face when she looks up. “Who knew ghosts could blush.”

This only makes Leah blush more. “Ronan?” She asks tentatively. “Are you flirting with me?”

“With very limited success, apparently.”

Leah stumbles away from Ronan and reaches up to touch her throat. Ronan looks hurt for only a moment before her face closes off, her arms hanging uselessly by her sides. “Shit. That was a stupid thing to say.”

Standing very still, Leah tries to speak. She feels the way she used to when she was alive, when she couldn’t breath, only she doesn’t actually need to breath, so it doesn’t make sense. Squeezing her eyes shut, she inhales slowly, as though that’s going to help. Nothing about the way she exists really makes sense. “It’s not that I don’t want you to flirt with me,” she says. “That would be nice. That would feel – normal.” Leah thinks about the nights she climbs into Ronan’s bed, the way Ronan will cling to her after a nightmare, pulling Leah’s arms tight around her chest and making herself as small as possible so that Leah can curl around her. She thinks about the two of them sitting on the roof of Monmouth, avoiding Gansey after using all the eggs in the fridge in a competition to see who could throw them farthest. She thinks of the times Ronan lets her hold Chainsaw, the gentle way she settles him into Leah’s outstretched hands, how she watches Leah’s face for a smile. “The best kind of normal,” she says. “It’s just that I don’t know if I get to have that normal anymore.”

Ronan has her arms crossed in front of her chest, her posture defensive. “Why not?”

Leah lets out a breath in frustration. “Because I’m not _real_ enough.”

In one stride, Ronan closes the space between them and, taking Leah’s face in both her hands to tilt her head up, kisses her. It hasn’t been that long since Leah’s been kissed. She’d kissed Blue, and that had been nice, but it had been different because she’d known then that Blue had been thinking of Gansey and it had been strange and sad and complicated. She knows just as clearly now that Ronan is only thinking about her, and that makes her feel better, if not completely okay, and the longer Ronan kisses her, the closer she gets to okay. Even when Ronan stops kissing her, she still holds Leah’s face in her hands, their foreheads pressed together, her mouth still close enough that Leah can feel her warm breath. “Leah,” she says, “shut up.”

Leah smiles, wide and unrestrained, and says, “Okay.” 

  
  



	21. Gansey/Ronan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s shocking to Gansey, that Ronan doesn’t even tip-toe on her way out, doesn’t cringe at the swinging of the liquor cabinet door, and she comes to realize that it’s not so much that Ronan has never been in trouble, it’s just that she knows what the punishment would be for a night spent outside with a bottle of whiskey, and she’s decided it’s a fair trade.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for alcohol, brief mentions of trauma around coming out

The summer before she comes to Aglionby, Gansey’s visits to the Barns are frequent and extended, especially before she buys Monmouth. She’s there under the pretense of familiarizing herself with Henrietta before the start of the school year, but in truth she spends more time in Singer’s Falls with the Lynch family. Her family have more or less accepted her transition -- after she’d secured a letter from her therapist, they’d been able to view it as a medical issue, something that could be fixed with surgery and hormones and a trip to court to have the gender marker on her I.D. changed. In their eyes, once all this is accomplished she is simply a girl and ceases to be trans. Gansey knows it shouldn’t bother her, that there are trans people who think of their experiences exactly as her parents do, that she is lucky to have a family that didn’t kick her out on the street, but she  _ is  _ bothered, and not for reasons she can easily express. She doesn’t like finding herself inarticulate. But she knows that whether she’s taking pride in it or feeling the persistent, aching bitterness that sometimes comes over her, she’ll always think of herself as trans, that it will always be a part of her identity. It feels strange, then, to be with a family who carefully pretend that her transition, because it is in their eyes complete, never happened. It’s a feeling like vertigo, she thinks, to be among people who don’t understand that there is innate trauma in the years she spent presenting as male. Maybe it’s because they have Ronan, who Gansey can only describe as aggressively lesbian, but her friend’s family never make her feel secret or hidden, swept under the rug. The Lynches with their rough-and-tumble affection, their noise and their frequent if amicable fights, are refreshing. Nora, Ronan’s mother, pulls her aside to tell her to call if any of the Aglionby girls give her any shit. Her own parents would never say something like that, not because they’re unwilling to protect their daughter but because they would never allude to the fact that there is anything about Gansey that makes her likely to be bullied. She thanks Nora and says she’ll keep her on speed dial, but the truth is, she doesn’t think she’d ever need at adult to intervene. She and Ronan are already fast friends and she’s seen Ronan’s right hook. It feels good to know she’s going to a new school with guaranteed protection.

On her visits, Gansey sleeps in Ronan’s room, but they spend most nights awake, going out to the visit the animals or lie in the tall grass and look at the stars. It’s shocking to Gansey, that Ronan doesn’t even tip-toe on her way out, doesn’t cringe at the swinging of the liquor cabinet door, and she comes to realize that it’s not so much that Ronan has never been in trouble, it’s just that she knows what the punishment would be for a night spent outside with a bottle of whiskey, and she’s decided it’s a fair trade. All her life, Gansey has been kept in such awe of the repercussions of poor behavior that she’s never put a toe out of line -- not until she came out, and that went poorly enough that she can’t imagine doing something actually wrong.  She likes these nights, the hum of alcohol in her blood, the Virginia warmth, how Ronan catches her hand as they walk and holds it. For a while, she’d thought that since she’s a girl, she must like boys, but she’s beginning to doubt that now. She isn’t completely oblivious, she notices the way Ronan watches her, knows that while other girls might hold hands platonically, Ronan doesn’t. At first she’d ignored it, assumed that mentioning it or even acknowledging it would mean ruining something about their friendship, but over the course of the summer, she’s less and less able to convince herself that the pleasure she takes from being watched by Ronan is simply the pleasure of a flattered ego. And it gets harder to convince herself that she doesn’t want to watch Ronan. 

Lying on the roof with a flask of rum between them, looking up at the stars and the milky way spanning the sky above, Gansey is the one to reach for Ronan’s hand. Out of her peripheral vision, she sees Ronan’s head jerk to look at her, but she stays still, suddenly brimming with jittery nerves. It isn’t like the straining anxiety of her everyday life -- instead of a racing heart and a light head and a creeping terror it’s butterflies in her stomach and her toes getting cold. She laces her fingers into Ronan’s and squeezes a little. Ronan squeezes back. Gansey fixes her eyes on Orion and as she names the stars in the back of her mind,  _ Betelgeuse, Bellatrix _ , she considers the potential consequences of kissing Ronan Lynch. She’s almost certain that Ronan likes her, so in some sense, there isn’t much risk at all.  _ Saiph, Rigel _ . But she’s learned that there are always risks with Ronan, because Ronan loves doing stupid stuff, likes to climb up onto the roof and get drunk, likes to drive way too fast on the twisting mountain roads, likes to goad people into fights. Ronan’s joy thrives on danger, and there’s something a little scary about how much Gansey loves the wild, loose-limbed Ronan made up entirely of adrenaline.  _ Mintaka, Alnilam, Alnitak.  _ There’s part of her that wonders if that’s what Ronan would be like if Gansey kissed her. There’s part of her that wonders it would be even better. 

Experimentally, still not sure what she’ll do, Gansey lifts Ronan’s hand to her mouth and kisses her knuckles very gently. Just a brush of the lips. She’s aware that Ronan hasn’t stopped looking at her since they started holding hands. 

Gansey thinks she can hear the effort Ronan is putting into keeping her voice steady when she asks, “What are you doing?”

Gansey doesn’t answer right away, takes a moment first to kiss the broad expanse of the back of Ronan’s hand. Ronan likes honesty. “I’m thinking about kissing you.” She feels more than she sees Ronan going tense as she turns over her hand to kiss her palm. Closing her eyes, she imagines Ronan’s palm on the side of her face, her shoulder, her waist. She opens her eyes and looks at Ronan. “Would you like that?”

Ronan nods, the gesture barely perceptible. Gansey wonders if she’s holding her breath. Lifting the flask and setting it down on her other side, Gansey rolls over tilts Ronan’s face up to kiss her. Ronan’s hands come up to hold Gansey’s hips with an unexpected gentleness. She should have expected it, though, she thinks to herself. She’s seen the way Ronan holds small animals and her younger sister. But there is something new, she thinks, in the way Ronan’s body is moving underneath her. Something like reverence, she thinks. Even then, it’s maybe not something she’s never seen before. The family has taken her with them to St. Agnes on several occasions. She’s seen Ronan before the altar.

This Ronan is soft and pliable beneath Gansey, making very small sounds, her fingertips barely pressing at her hips. Gentle, she thinks, not out of a lack of desire but an excess of love. It’s sweet and it’s touching, and some demon in Gansey prompts her to try to break through this softness. She trails a line of kisses across Ronan’s face and down her neck, biting gently. Ronan makes a sharp, high noise and Gansey grins against the delicate skin just above Ronan’s collarbones. She bites harder and this time the sound is more of a whimper as Ronan clutches at the back of Gansey’s shirt, her feet scrabbling against the the surface of the roof and Gansey likes this Ronan, maybe a little too much, maybe the perfect amount. She likes that this Ronan is private and new and  _ hers.  _ She slips her hand under Ronan’s shirt and runs her nails over her stomach and Ronan whispers “ _ Fuck”  _ into Gansey’s ear. Pulling back, she looks down at Ronan, who catches hold of the front hem of Gansey’s shirt, tugging uselessly at her. 

“Is that okay?” She asks, already certain of the answer but wanting confirmation, wanting to hear Ronan say it.

Ronan’s words come out in one breath, a jumble of sound. “Fuck please yes Gansey  _ please, _ ” and Gansey leans back down to kiss her hard and put her hand up Ronan’s shirt again. Because yes, she likes this Ronan, wanting and needing and out of control (or perhaps more precisely, under Gansey’s control) and all of it for her. All of it for Gansey. Her hands pressing down on Ronan’s shoulders, she sucks a hickey onto her neck, eliciting a lovely string of profanities. 

When she sits up and moves away, Ronan looks at her like a kicked dog. Lying on her stomach, propped on her elbows, she says conversationally, “You know, it occurs to me that the roof of your house might not be the wisest place to make out.

Ronan rolls her eyes but grins too and rolls over to punch Gansey lightly on the arm before kissing her again. “Okay,” she says quietly against Gansey’s mouth. “Race you to my bedroom.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Lena & Angie for proofing!
> 
> Tumblr for this project: lady-trc  
> My fandom tumblr: psychotic-adam-parrish


End file.
